Elena von Perponcher¹, Renata Hechenrieder¹, Mark Greenlee¹, Tina Plank¹; ¹Institute for Experimental Psychology, University of Regensburg

Individuals with central vision loss rely on peripheral vision, leading to the development of a "preferred retinal locus" (PRL) through oculomotor and perceptual learning. The mechanisms guiding PRL location selection remain unclear. One proposed factor influencing PRL location selection – and potentially identifying optimal sites for PRL training prior to the onset of a complete central scotoma – is the individual's ability to sustain attention at that location. To investigate the link between sustained attention and perceptual learning, we assessed sustained attention in eight peripheral locations (8° eccentricity) in 14 normally sighted participants. Participants fixated centrally and directed their attention for 2.5 – 4 seconds to a cued eccentric location before identifying the orientation of a Landolt-C gap (up, down, left, right) at that location, amidst full-ring distractors in the other seven locations, followed by 100 ms masks across all locations. Participants then underwent four training sessions in a Landolt-C gap detection crowding task at their highest (HPL) and lowest (LPL) sustained attention performance locations. A 2-down, 1-up adaptive procedure adjusted the critical spatial distance of two ring-shaped flanker distractors positioned radially and tangentially to the Landolt-C with respect to central fixation. Following training, sustained attention was re-evaluated across all locations. Preliminary results indicate: (1) significant improvement in sustained attention at the LPL (p < .05), but not at the HPL (despite room for improvement), (2) stronger initial crowding effects and radial-tangential anisotropy at the LPL compared to the HPL, and (3) a trend towards greater perceptual training effects at the LPL. The findings suggest that perceptual learning training may enhance sustained attention performance in locations recommended for PRL development, particularly when these locations initially exhibit suboptimal sustained attention. Interactions between HPL and LPL placement within the visual field and crowding performance need to be determined further with larger cohorts.

Acknowledgements: This research was supported by funding programs of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes), the Marianne Plehn Program of the Elite Network Bavaria, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG: PL641-1/1), and the ZSER e.V. Regensburg.