Abstract

The assessment of visual function in neurologically impaired patients is a difficult and time consuming procedure. Quite often these patients are elderly or have serious health problems causing them to fatigue rapidly. Many brain damaged neurological patients have visual field, language, or attention deficits. Such patients may be unable to cooperate and often continue to report on a non-tested, control aspect of the stimulus (e.g., position instead of movement, or size instead of color.) These are among the many reasons for a patients’s poor performance on a psychophysical task. Nevertheless, the combination of psychophysical techniques with modem brain imaging techniques such as 3-D MRI reconstruction (Damasio & Frank, 1992) of the lesions in brain damaged patients can still offer a wealth of information about the the anatomical substrate of human visual processing.

© 1993 Optical Society of America