Visual cues usually play a vital role in social interaction. As well as being the primary cue for identifying other people, visual cues also provide crucial non-verbal social information via both facial expressions and body language. One consequence of vision loss is the need to rely on non-visual cues during social interaction. Although verbal cues can carry a significant amount of information, this information is often not available to an untrained listener. Here, we review the current literature examining potential ways that the loss of social information due to vision loss might impact social functioning. A large number of studies suggest that low vision and blindness is a risk factor for anxiety and depression. This relationship has been attributed to multiple factors, including anxiety about disease progression, and impairments to quality of life that include difficulties reading, and a lack of access to work and social activities. However, our review suggests a potential additional contributing factor to reduced quality of life that has been hitherto overlooked: blindness may make it more difficult to effectively engage in social interactions, due to a loss of visual information. The current literature suggests it might be worth considering training in voice discrimination and/or recognition when carrying out rehabilitative training in late blind individuals.
Electrical stimulation of retinal neurons has been shown to be a feasible way to elicit visual percepts in patients blind from retinal degenerations. The EPIRET3 retinal implant is the first completely wireless intraocular implant for epiretinal stimulation. Stimulation tests have been performed during a clinical trial that was carried out at the eye clinics of Aachen and Essen to evaluate the safety and the efficacy of the implant.Six legally blind retinitis pigmentosa patients were included in the study. In accordance with the regulations laid down in the study protocol, three 1-hour perceptual tests for each subject were performed within 4 weeks of surgery. Stimuli were charge-balanced square current pulses of various durations and current amplitudes.All subjects reported visual percepts as a result of electrical stimulation by the implant. Thresholds for eliciting visual percepts varied between them but were below the safety limits of electrical stimulation. Stimulation success depended stronger on pulse duration than on current amplitude or total charge delivered. Subjects were able to discriminate between stimulation patterns of different orientations or at different locations of the electrode array.The EPIRET3 system is suitable to elicit visual percepts in blind retinitis pigmentosa patients.
A chromatic surround can have a strong influence on the perceived hue of a stimulus. We investigated whether chromatic induction has similar effects on the perception of colors that appear pure and unmixed (unique red, green, blue, and yellow) as on other colors. Subjects performed unique hue settings of stimuli in isoluminant surrounds of different chromaticities. Compared with the settings in a neutral gray surround, unique hue settings altered systematically with chromatic surrounds. The amount of induced hue shift depended on the difference between stimulus and surround hues, and was similar for unique hue settings as for settings of nonunique hues. Intraindividual variability in unique hue settings was roughly twice as high as for settings obtained in asymmetric matching experiments, which may reflect the presence of a reference stimulus in the matching task. Variabilities were also larger with chromatic surrounds than with neutral gray surrounds, for both unique hue settings and matching of nonunique hues. The results suggest that the neural representations underlying unique hue percepts are influenced by the same neural processing mechanisms as the percepts of other colors.
The perceived color of a chromatic stimulus is influenced by the chromaticity of its surround. To investigate these influences along the dimension of hue, we measured hue changes induced in stimuli of different hues by isoluminant chromatic surrounds. Generally, induced hue changes were directed in color space away from the hue of the inducing surround and depended on the magnitude on the hue difference between stimulus and surround. With increasing difference in hue between stimulus and surround, induced hue changes increased up to a maximum and then decreased for larger differences. This qualitative pattern was similar for different inducers, but quantitatively, induction was weaker along some directions in cone-opponent color space than along other directions. The strongest induction effects were found along an oblique, blue-yellow axis that corresponds to the daylight axis. The overall pattern of the induction effect shows similarities to the well-known tilt effect, where shifts in perceived angle of oriented stimuli are induced by oriented surrounds. This suggests analogous neural representations and similar mechanisms of contextual processing for different visual features such as orientation and color.
