FUNCTIONAL VISION

Functional vision refers to the interaction between our environment and how we process visual information -- functional vision is our everyday vision. Different vision tasks in our everyday life use different parts of our visual system. Consider the image below.

The newspaper print in this picture has high contrast, small black letters on a near-white background. Individuals with poor contrast sensitivity may still be able to read the high contrast newspaper but still experience difficulty seeing other everyday objects that does not have such high contrast, like in the street scene in the picture. Notice the lower contrast of the people in the foreground and the greater difficulty viewing people further down the road. Functional vision reflects our vision in real world situations where we have to see both small, high contrast images and larger, lower contrast images. (In references, see: Ginsburg AP. Spatial filtering and visual form perception.)

Night Driving :: Some individuals experience difficulty driving at night due to poor contrast sensitivity or from glare and starbursts from oncoming headlights. This type of vision difficulty is a reflection of our functional vision.

The image on the left is what a night driving scene looks like to a person with normal vision. The image on the right is what a night driving scene can look like to a person with poor contrast sensitivity and difficulty with glare and starbursts.

 

 

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