I've told you about ReadRight before - well, University College London and Dr Alex Leff are doing it again (trying to help train the eye movements of people with hemianopia), only this time with visual search aka "looking for things". In this blog post I talked about a paper describing the lack of transfer between training visual search and reading (that is, visual search doesn't really help reading and vice versa). So it made sense for the UCL group to complement their reading rehabilitation method with one intended to rehabilitate visual search.
The training task is a bit different from other visual search training - they use a "ramp-step" task, where an object is followed as it moves smoothly across the screen - it then jumps across to the other side of the screen, and the person doing the training has to make a rapid eye movement to its new location. This is repeated lots of times.
Preliminary results in a few participants were published in this paper in the journal Cortex this year. The study, in 7 patients with hemianopia and 6 healthy participants, found that after training (300 goes at the training task, taking 30 minutes in total), patients were significantly quicker to find things in a picture of a cluttered desk than they had been before training (healthy participants weren't). The patients had long-standing hemianopia and the researchers tested them twice before training to make sure they didn't recover in-between, and to check that the tests gave similar results on both sessions without training (so the crowded desk task seemed reliable).
If you want to give it a try, click on the logo.
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