Field of View, Figure/Ground Discrimination, Sequential Memory, and Navigation Skills Improve Following Training on Motion Discrimination in Older Adults

Background: Brain timing is disrupted in older adults affecting attention, memory, navigation and mental processing speed. Processing speed deficits, in turn, are thought to underlie older adults’ decline in cognitive capabilities. Moreover, older adults have decreased contrast sensitivity for motion detection and discrimination. These contrast sensitivity losses are likely due to age-related changes in magnocellular pathways. Previous studies of older adults found that training on motion detection and discrimination, combined with object recognition, significantly improved processing speed and navigation. Methods: This pilot study addressed whether training on direction discrimination, which improves timing in the dorsal pathway, would improve the ability of older adults to discriminate the direction of motion and increase mental processing speed, thereby improving visual and higher cognitive functions, like driving, navigation, and sequential processing. Seven adults between the ages of 55 to 74 were studied. In this study, each person completed two sessions of Correspondence regarding this article can be emailed to tlawton@ pathtoreading.com or sent to Dr. Teri Lawton, 253 Sea Forest Court, Del Mar, CA 92014. All statements are the author’s personal opinion and may not reflect the opinions of the College of Optometrists in Vision Development, Optometry & Vision Development or any institution or organization to which the author may be affiliated. Permission to use reprints of this article must be obtained from the editor. Copyright 2009 College of Optometrists in Vision Development. OVD is indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. Online access is available at http://www.covd. org. In the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that Dr. Lawton has a significant financial interest in many of the topics/therapies discussed in this article. Lawton T. Field of view, figure/ground discrimination, sequential memory, and navigation skills improve following training on motion discrimination in older adults. Optom Vis Dev 2009:40(2):82-93. direction-discrimination training (20 minutes or less) twice a week for an average of 12 weeks, using patterns optimized for activating magnocellular pathways. Results: Across all subjects, direction discrimination contrast sensitivity improved significantly (p<0.0001), an average of 7-fold. Among other symptoms, the older adults in this study reported difficulties when driving. In hindsight, these reported driving difficulties appear to be related to a decreased useful field of view. Following training on direction discrimination, observers reported that these limitations were resolved. These older adults found an increase in their functional field of view, better figure/ ground discrimination, enhancements in working memory, sequential processing, and improvements in navigation. Conclusions: It is possible that the deficits in attentional focus, figure-ground discrimination, sequential memory, and navigation experienced by some older adults result from an information overload due to timing deficits that are abated following training on direction discrimination. One possible neurobiological mechanism for these timing deficits of older adults is that sluggish magnocellular neurons found in the dorsal pathway do not signal in advance of the parvocellular neurons, making it difficult to attend in direction discrimination tasks.