An exploratory study of temporal integration in the peripheral retina of myopes

The visual system takes time to respond to visual stimuli, neurons need to accumulate information over a time span in order to fire. Visual information perceived by the peripheral retina might be impaired by imperfect peripheral optics leading to myopia development. This study explored the effect of eccentricity, moderate myopia and peripheral refraction in temporal visual integration. Myopes and emmetropes showed similar performance at detecting briefly flashed stimuli in different retinal locations. Our results show evidence that moderate myopes have normal visual integration when refractive errors are corrected with contact lens; however, the tendency to increased temporal integration thresholds observed in myopes deserves further investigation.Parts of these results have been presented at ARVO 2012 annual meeting. We would like to acknowledge Associação de Profissionais Licenciados em Optometria (APLO) for their financial support and Inês Sousa PhD for her help with the statistics. REFERENCES