How People with Vision Loss Judge Approaching Vehicles

A new study reveals how people with vision loss judge approaching vehicles.

Patricia DeLucia has spent decades studying something many of us never think about: judgments about collisions that are crucial for safety. But the roots of her research stretch back to her childhood, long before she became a professor of psychological sciences at Rice University.

“I grew up playing sports, and when you’re on the field, collision judgment is everything-whether a ball is coming at you, whether a player is about to run into you, whether you have time to move,” she says.

“I didn’t know it then, but that experience shaped my entire research path.”

That lifelong curiosity eventually led DeLucia to conduct research on collision judgments made by people with visual impairment, specifically those with age-related macular degeneration (AMD).

published in PLOS One,the new study used a virtual reality system to examine how adults with and without AMD estimate when an approaching vehicle would reach them.

The virtual reality system, based on the one set up by Daniel Oberfeld at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, paired visual simulations with realistic car sounds, allowing participants to experience an approaching vehicle through sight, sound, or both before it disappeared.They then pressed a button to indicate when the vehicle would have reached their location. The project was carried out by a multidisciplinary team from multiple sites in the united States and Europe and was funded by a grant from the National Eye Institute at the National Institutes of Health.

“We wanted to understand whether people with impaired vision rely more heavily on sound and whether having both sight and sound provides an advantage.”