Functional vision barriers: a new concept analyzed in terms of human visual performance.

COLOMBO ELISA MARGARITA; O´DONELL, BEATRIZ M.; SANTILÁN, JAVIER ENRRIQUE; ISSOLIO, LUIS ALBERTO

Psychology & Neuroscience

Universidad de Río de Janeiro, Brasilia y San Pablo This journal uses Open Journal Systems 2.2.1.0, which is open source journal management and publishing software developed, supported, and freely distributed by the Public Knowledge Project under the GNU

Lugar: Rio de Janeiro; Año: 2013 vol. 6 p. 219 - 226

1984-3054

In this work, we propose to introduce a new category of barriers that we have called "functional vision barriers". With this expression we refer to lighting and visual elements that may complicate or hinder functional vision, and which may make life even more difficult for people with visual defects. These barriers appear as a consequence of certain negative effects on people, caused either by a poor design of the visual stimulus or by the visual environment that surrounds it, where lighting is one of the main factors. We use the term ?functional vision? because this expression refers to the ability of the visual system to perform everyday tasks. To exemplify this proposal, we have analyzed some of our previous results that respond to situations that can be considered ?functional vision barriers?: 1) stimuli with low luminance contrast information, where the addition of chromatic contrast improves visual performance, and 2) tasks that are carried out in the presence of a glare source in the visual field, diminishing visual performance and reducing brightness perception.