Aurélie Calabrèse
Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive
CNRS & AMU
Understanding the reading deficits of individuals with central vision loss to help restore their reading abilities.
Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) accounts for 8.7% of all blindness worldwide and is the most common cause of blindness in developed countries. Older adults suffering from AMD often lose the ability to use central vision after developing a central scotoma. Despite advances in the treatment of wet AMD, central vision cannot be restored and difficulty with reading is often the primary complaint of AMD patients, who have to use their peripheral vision for reading. The number of Europeans with AMD, and who struggle with reading, is expected to reach 60 million by 2030. When eye disorders limit people’s access to printed text, the issue is vision disability, not literacy, but the individual consequences may be just as severe.
The focus of this talk will be to present some of the latest progress made to understand (and therefore overcome) the underlying factors of the reading deficits following central vision loss (CVL). Questions that will be covered include: what sensory, cognitive and oculo-motor factors can explain slow reading speed with CVL? Can reading performance be improved through training and what are the cortical sites involved in this improvement? How to optimize reading aids and reading diagnostic tools?
