Presbyopia corrections: optical, perceptual and adaptational implications

Presbyopia is the physiological inability of the crystalline lens to accommodate for objects at near distance. While accommodative lenses are the ideal solutions for presbyopia, current optical solutions rely on providing an acceptable quality of vision at near and far distances. Optimization of the optical solutions rely on better understanding of how the visual system copes with the visual quality produced by the various optical solutions. The aim of this thesis is to study optical, visual and perceptual performance of different presbyopic corrections such as alternating vision, monovision and simultaneous vision, and to study the effect of adaptation on perceptual performances. Methods: We measured and corrected ocular aberrations using custom developed adaptive optics setup, used images blurred by real aberrations of different orientation and/or magnitude and measured the internal code for blur in eyes with long term differences in blur magnitude or orientation using a classification-image like technique. We later used numerically convolved images of different far/near energy and different near additions to study the short term adaptation to pure simultaneous vision using single stimulus detection and scoring tasks..