Screen time can change visual perception -- and that's not necessarily
bad

Date:
September 30, 2020
Source:
Binghamton University
Summary:
The coronavirus pandemic has shifted many of our interactions
online, with Zoom video calls replacing in-person classes, work
meetings, conferences and other events. Will all that screen
time damage our vision? Maybe not. It turns out that our visual
perception is highly adaptable, according to new research.



FULL STORY ==========================================================================
The coronavirus pandemic has shifted many of our interactions online,
with Zoom video calls replacing in-person classes, work meetings,
conferences and other events. Will all that screen time damage our vision?

========================================================================== Maybe not. It turns out that our visual perception is highly adaptable, according to research from Psychology Professor and Cognitive and Brain Sciences Coordinator Peter Gerhardstein's lab at Binghamton University.

Gerhardstein, Daniel Hipp and Sara Olsen -- his former doctoral
students - - will publish "Mind-Craft: Exploring the Effect of Digital
Visual Experience on Changes in Orientation Sensitivity in Visual
Contour Perception," in an upcoming issue of the academic journal
Perception. Hipp, the lead author and main originator of the research,
is now at the VA Eastern Colorado Health Care System's Laboratory for
Clinical and Translational Research. Olsen, who designed stimuli for
the research and aided in the analysis of the results, is now at the
University of Minnesota's Department of Psychiatry.

"The finding in the work is that the human perceptual system rapidly
adjusts to a substantive alteration in the statistics of the visual world, which, as we show, is what happens when someone is playing video games," Gerhardstein said.

The experiments The research focuses on a basic element of vision:
our perception of orientation in the environment.



==========================================================================
Take a walk through the Binghamton University Nature Preserve and
look around.

Stimuli -- trees, branches, bushes, the path -- are oriented in many
different angles. According to an analysis by Hipp, there is a slight predominance of horizontal and then vertical planes -- think of the
ground and the trees -- but no shortage of oblique angles.

Then consider the "carpentered world" of a cityscape -- downtown
Binghamton, perhaps. The percentage of horizontal and vertical
orientations increases dramatically, while the obliques fall
away. Buildings, roofs, streets, lampposts: The cityscape is a world of
sharp angles, like the corner of a rectangle. The digital world ramps
up the predominance of the horizontal and vertical planes, Gerhardstein explained.

Research shows that we tend to pay more attention to horizontal and
vertical orientations, at least in the lab; in real-world environments,
these differences probably aren't noticeable, although they likely
still drive behavior. Painters, for example, tend to exacerbate these distinctions in their work, a focus of a different research group.

Orientation is a fundamental aspect of how our brain and eyes work
together to build the visual world. Interestingly, it's not fixed;
our visual system can adapt to changes swiftly, as the group's two
experiments show.

The first experiment established a method of eye tracking that doesn't
require an overt response, such as touching a screen. The second had
college students play four hours of Minecraft -- one of the most popular computer games in the world -- before and after showing them visual
stimuli. Then, researchers determined subjects' ability to perceive
phenomena in the oblique and vertical/ horizontal orientations using
the eye-tracking method from the first experiment.



==========================================================================
A single session produced a clearly detectable change. While the
screen-less control group showed no changes in their perception,
the game-players detected horizontal and vertical orientations more
easily. Neither group changed their perception in oblique orientations.

We still don't know how temporary these changes are, although Gerhardstein speculates that the vision of the game-playing research subjects likely returned to normal quickly.

"So, the immediate takeaway is the impressive extent to which the young
adult visual system can rapidly adapt to changes in the statistics of
the visual environment," he said.

In the next phase of research, Gerhardstein's lab will track the visual development of two groups of children, one assigned to regularly play
video games and the other to avoid screen-time, including television. If
the current experiment is any indication, there may be no significant differences, at least when it comes to orientation sensitivity. The
pandemic has put in-person testing plans on hold, although researchers
have given a survey about children's playing habits to local parents
and will use the results to design a study.

Adaptive vision Other research groups who have examined the effects of
digital exposure on other aspects of visual perception have concluded
that long-term changes do take place, at least some of which are seen
as helpful.

Helpful? Like other organisms, humans tend to adapt fully to the
environment they experience. The first iPhone came out in 2008 and the
first iPad in 2010.

Children who are around 10 to 12 years old have grown up with these
devices, and will live and operate in a digital world as adults,
Gerhardstein pointed out.

"Is it adaptive for them to develop a visual system that is highly
sensitive to this particular environment? Many would argue that it is,"
he said. "I would instead suggest that a highly flexible system that can
shift from one perceptual 'set' to another rapidly, so that observers
are responding appropriately to the statistics of a digital environment
while interacting with digital media, and then shifting to respond appropriately to the statistics of a natural scene or a cityscape,
would be most adaptive."

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by Binghamton_University. Original
written by Jennifer Micale. Note: Content may be edited for style
and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. D. Hipp, S. Olsen, P. Gerhardstein. Mind-Craft: Exploring the
Effect of
Digital Visual Experience on Changes to Orientation Sensitivity in
Visual Contour Perception. Perception, 2020; 030100662095098 DOI:
10.1177/ 0301006620950989 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200930144422.htm

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