Does visual sensitivity improve between 5 and 8 years? A study of automated visual field examination

In 74 normal subjects (62 children aged 5-8 years and 12 adults), we tested the widely-held belief that Visual sensitivity improves substantially duri ng childhood. Maturation of the retino-striate pathways is generally invoke d to account for age-related changes in visual sensitivity. We evaluated th e extent to which attentional factors unduly emphasized the effect of age o n the purely physiological mechanisms. After a specially-designed familiari zation procedure, sensitivity was fully evaluated at two locations in the s uperior temporal field using a bracketing technique (Octopus 2000R). False- positive (FP) and false-negative (FN) catch-trials were interspersed with t he sequence of stimuli. Analyses demonstrated that: (1) age affected sensit ivity; and (2) the general level of attentiveness varied not only with age, but also among subjects in the same age group. We then estimated the exten t to which improved visual sensitivity may reflect a concomitant evolution of Vigilance. Firstly, controlled variance analyses indicated that factors for evaluating attentiveness (rate of FN responses, slope of the psychometr ic function at the median, and goodness of fit) were indeed much better pre dictors than age of the sensitivity measured. Secondly and more significant ly, the grouping of subjects into homogeneous subgroups, on the basis of th eir attentional performance, showed that children as young as 5 years may h ave a visual sensitivity that is only marginally lower than that of adults. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.