The past July was a happy month for our lab member Juan Sepulveda and his supervisors, as his thesis named “Central and peripheral motion perception in healthy ageing and its potential relationship with driving” passed the examination to obtain the PhD degree. Juan’s thesis was supervised by Prof. Allison McKendrick and A. Prof. Andrew Anderson from the Department of Optometry and Vision Sciences at The University of Melbourne, and Prof. Joanne Wood from the Centre for Vision and Eye Research, School of Optometry and Vision Science at Queensland University of Technology.
In his thesis, Juan explored what happens to the perception of visual motion in older adults. Juan assessed performance for a range of different moving stimuli, and considered situations of relevance to driving (i.e. simulating nighttime driving and driving under the presence of car headlights), finding that the deficits experienced by older adults were mostly related to difficulties detecting low contrast patterns. Additionally, Juan found a mild relationship between motion perception tests and a commonly used video-based test of driving, the Hazard Perception Test. Juan recently presented these findings at the 2021 European Conference on Visual Perception (ECVP). The Hazard Perception Test is used in many jurisdictions to apply for a driver’s license. It measures the ability to identify and predict potentially dangerous situations in a driving scenario. The results of this experiment showed that measures of motion perception are better predictors of performance on The Hazard Perception Test than measures of visual acuity, a measurement that is often used to assess vision for driving.
A copy of the poster can be downloaded here:
Clinical Psychophysics Unit, Optometry & Vision Sciences, University of Melbourne 