Blurry Means Good Focus: Myopia and Visual Attention

A correlation between myopia and visuo-spatial attention is reported. More severe myopia was found to be associated with better ability to quickly narrow the focus of visual attention to a small region of space (assessed via interference from spatial proximity of to-be-ignored inverted half-faces), in a task where local focus was explicitly required. There was no myopia association with size of the default attentional window, when the need to respond to either small local or larger global regions was equally likely (in a particular Navon figure task). Results suggest that myopics might allocate attention more narrowly than individuals with normal eyesight in certain functionally important visual tasks (eg reading) but not others (eg driving).