Differential impact of partial XXXX on gaze strategies when sitting and walking - an immersive virtual reality study.

@entity910 @entity12661 @entity227
The present experiments aimed to characterize the visual performance of subjects with long-standing, unilateral @entity12661 when walking in a naturalistic, virtual environment. Under static, seated testing conditions, cortically blind subjects are known to exhibit compensatory eye movement strategies. However, they still complain of significant @entity227 during navigation. To assess whether this is due to a change in compensatory eye movement strategy between sitting and walking, we measured eye and @entity910 in subjects asked to detect peripherally-presented, moving basketballs. When seated, cortically blind subjects detected    80% of balls, while controls detected almost all balls. Seated blind subjects did not make larger @entity910 than controls, but they consistently biased their fixation distribution towards their blind hemifield. When walking, @entity910 were similar in the two groups, but the fixation bias decreased to the point that fixation distribution in cortically blind subjects became similar to that in controls - with one major exception: at the time of basketball appearance, walking controls looked primarily at the far ground, in upper quadrants of the virtual field of view; cortically blind subjects looked significantly more at the near ground, in lower quadrants of the virtual field. @entity12661 subjects detected only 58% of the balls when walking while controls detected    90%. Thus, the adaptive gaze strategies adopted by cortically blind individuals as a compensation for their @entity227 are strongest and most effective when seated and stationary. Walking significantly alters these gaze strategies in a way that seems to favor walking performance, but impairs peripheral target detection. It is possible that this impairment underlies the experienced difficulty of those with @entity12661 when navigating in real life.
