Dr. John Andersen recently visited our research group from his laboratory at the University of California at Riverside, to help us understand important studies conducted in his laboratory documenting some aspects of change in the visual perceptual abilities of older individuals. He and his colleagues have conducted a number of important and provocative studies that richly expose emergent problems in the accurate reception and judgments about moving stimuli. Older individuals get less information from motion than to young viewers; they also make slower and less precise judgments about things that they see moving. These abilities are important for ALL of us – and doubly so for you hunters or birders or automobile jockeys or horse people or tennis players or babysitters of active grandchildren or a thousand other aficionados, for whom movement is of the essence!
Of course our goal is to elaborate our visual training strategies to even more strongly recover these very important skills and abilities. John Andersen has been an important source of insight for us, in the development of new tools. I thought that you might be interested in meeting him, and in hearing him talk about this aspect of vision reception, put in his own worlds. If that sounds interesting to you, check it out, below!
For those “at an older age” encountering activities with “fast moving things”. Often, activities once done in the past involving fast movement are much more rarely done/practiced. Problem, and example: Say during an average week, you drive only 1-2 days and for only 30 minutes to 1 hour total. After days of no driving, when you thrust yourself into the visually highly complicated realm of moving traffic, this will of course be very visually and cognitively taxing. Advice: Even if you don’t have to drive anywhere, try practicing driving around different areas, just to stay familiar with the different aspects of your car, and the different aspects of traffic.
Driving is just one example. Could be applied to many things. If you do activity X only once a week or once every two weeks, and if the activity involves fast moving things, it can probably be expected that your visual system might be kind of stunned by the new activity, even if you did it just one or two weeks ago. Again, practice more – do the activity more. Kind of like someone who exercises once a week. Almost certainly, after a week of little to no sustained exercise, when the day comes for their workout, it will be shocking physically and mentally. A solution – exercise more often.
Stay familiar with the intricacy of the activities. Practice and more practice will likely keep your abilities at a higher level and keep you ready to face what you have to.
Consider a driving simulation machine, with a driving computer program. You have the stimuli on a flat screen, in 2 dimensions, and in a limited area and only directly in front of you. Real driving involves 3D, activity 360 degrees around you, head movements, and movement through space. This can’t be replicated in any sense with a computer program. But most of all, when you drive, you are out there driving. It’s real. The danger, anxiety, enjoyment, time-constraints, rules, are very present and real. With a computer program, these things are only as real as you can force yourself to imagine they are, sort of like watching a fictional movie that you let yourself go with, rather than dismissing everything as “only a movie”. But you can never replicate reality with computer programs. But then again, computer programs are one small part of training for many people (pilots, and the like). But, a very small part, and, the programs they use are 3D, and have a 360 degree visual field I believe.
From Dan Howitt, 9/27/1010
Interesting interview.
Dan Howitt