Reading performance in middle-aged adults with declines in accommodation

The present study investigated the effects of presbyopia on the reading ability of middle-aged adults in a Japanese reading context, using the rapid serial visual presentation paradigm. Japanese words, each consisting of three characters, were sequentially presented at the same location on a display screen. Participants were instructed to read the words aloud as accurately as possible, irrespective of their order within the sequence. Experiment 1 showed that the reading performance for the presbyopes was far worse for the near-viewing (35?cm) than for the far-viewing (70?cm) conditions when the words were presented at 0.4° in character size. Experiment 2 investigated in detail the effect of luminance contrast on reading at a viewing distance of 35?cm. The minimums of the exposure durations within which the participants could read the words above 89.9?% correct (minimum exposure duration) were 498?ms/word for the presbyopes and 134?ms/word for the nonpresbyopes, both of which values were obtained at 100?% contrast. The critical contrast??that is, the contrast that doubled the minimum exposure duration that had been obtained at 100?% contrast??was considerably higher for the presbyopes (39.2?%) than for the nonpresbyopes (16.4?%). However, the reading performance for the presbyopes was improved more than threefold when the contrast was increased to 100?% in both experiments. Thus, our results provide psychophysical evidence for the dependency of presbyopes?? reading on viewing distance and luminance contrast.