The coronavirus pandemic has shifted many of our interactions online, with Zoom video calls replacing in-person classes, work meetings, conferences and other events. Will all that screen time damage our vision? Maybe not. It turns out that our visual perception is highly adaptable, according to new research.

Maybe not. It turns out that our visual perception is highly adaptable, according to research from Psychology Professor and Cognitive and Brain Sciences Coordinator Peter Gerhardstein’s lab at Binghamton University.

Gerhardstein, Daniel Hipp and Sara Olsen — his former doctoral students — will publish «Mind-Craft: Exploring the Effect of Digital Visual Experience on Changes in Orientation Sensitivity in Visual Contour Perception,» in an upcoming issue of the academic journal Perception. Hipp, the lead author and main originator of the research, is now at the VA Eastern Colorado Health Care System’s Laboratory for Clinical and Translational Research. Olsen, who designed stimuli for the research and aided in the analysis of the results, is now at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Psychiatry.

«The finding in the work is that the human perceptual system rapidly adjusts to a substantive alteration in the statistics of the visual world, which, as we show, is what happens when someone is playing video games,» Gerhardstein said.

The experiments

The research focuses on a basic element of vision: our perception of orientation in the environment.

Story Source: Materials provided by Binghamton University. Original written by Jennifer Micale. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.