Optical and adaptational limits of vision studied using Adaptive Optics

Susana Marcos
Istituto de Optica, CSIC, Madrid, Spain

Ocular aberrations blur the retinal image. Adaptive Optics is an
excellent tool to test the potential benefits to vision when
aberrations are corrected, and exploring the limits of spatial
vision. I will describe a custom developed Adaptive Optics system,
provided with a psychophysical channel that we are using to measure
the changes in visual acuity (for different luminances and contrast
polarities) with corrected high order aberrations, the changes in
accommodation when the aberrations are manipulated, the influence of
optical aberrations in subjective sharpness impression of natural
images and facial recognition tasks, and the potentials for adaptation
to ocular aberrations.