ArticlePsychonomic bulletin & review2015
Is 20/20 vision good enough? Visual acuity differences within the normal range predict contour element detection and integration.
Article in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 25 citations in OpenAlex.
- Atypical Use of Visuospatial Context in Psychotic Psychopathology: A Meta-analysis.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2025Pooled it
- Associations between psychosis and visual acuity impairment: A systematic review and meta-analysis.Acta psychiatrica Scandinavica · 2021Pooled it
- Impaired Contour Object Perception in Psychosis.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2026Article
- Reduced Visual Function in Schizotypal Traits: An Exploratory Study.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2025Article
- Impaired contour object perception in psychosis.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2024Article
- Stronger tilt aftereffects in individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia spectrum disorders but not bipolar disorder.Schizophrenia research · 2024Article
- Article
- Association Between Childhood Visual Acuity and Late Adolescent Psychotic Experiences: A Prospective Birth Cohort Study.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2022Article
- Is there a relation between visual motor integration and academic achievement in school-aged children with and without ADHD?Child neuropsychology : a journal on normal and abnormal development in childhood and adolescence · 2022Article
- Development and Evaluation of a Visual Remediation Intervention for People with Schizophrenia.Journal of psychiatry and brain science · 2020Article
- Fragmented ambiguous objects: Stimuli with stable low-level features for object recognition tasks.PloS one · 2019Article
- Poorer Search Efficiency in Healthy Young Adults With High Schizotypal Personality Traits.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2018Article
- Poorer Integration of Local Orientation Information Occurs in Students With High Schizotypal Personality Traits.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2018Article
- Sensory integration deficits support a dimensional view of psychosis and are not limited to schizophrenia.Translational psychiatry · 2017Article
- Visual integration dysfunction in schizophrenia arises by the first psychotic episode and worsens with illness duration.Journal of abnormal psychology · 2016Article
- Selective impairment of global motion integration, but not global form detection, in schizophrenia and bipolar affective disorder.Schizophrenia research. Cognition · 2016Article
- Schizophrenia and the eye.Schizophrenia research. Cognition · 2015Article
- Article
- Multiple forms of contour grouping deficits in schizophrenia: what is the role of spatial frequency?Neuropsychologia · 2014Article
- Processing of spatial-frequency altered faces in schizophrenia: effects of illness phase and duration.PloS one · 2014Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Contour integration (CI) combines appropriately aligned and oriented elements into continuous boundaries. Collinear facilitation (CF) occurs when a low-contrast oriented element becomes more visible when flanked by collinear high-contrast elements. Both processes rely at least partly on long-range horizontal connections in early visual cortex, and thus both have been extensively studied to understand visual cortical functioning in aging, development, and clinical disorders. Here, we ask: Can acuity differences within the normal range predict CI or CF? To consider this question, we measured binocular visual acuity and compared subjects with 20/20 vision to those with better-than-20/20 vision (SharpPerceivers) on two tasks. In the CI task, subjects located an integrated shape embedded in varying amounts of noise; in the CF task, subjects detected a low-contrast element flanked by collinear or orthogonal high-contrast elements. In each case, displays were scaled in size to modulate element visibility and spatial frequency (4-12 cycles/deg). SharpPerceivers could integrate contours under noisier conditions than the 20/20 group (p = .0002), especially for high spatial frequency displays. Moreover, although the two groups exhibited similar collinear facilitation, SharpPerceivers could detect the central target with lower contrast at high spatial frequencies (p <. 05). These results suggest that small acuity differences within the normal range--corresponding to about a one line difference on a vision chart--strongly predict element detection and integration. Furthermore, simply ensuring that subjects have normal or corrected-to-normal vision is not sufficient when comparing groups on contour tasks; visual acuity confounds also need to be ruled out.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.