Adapting to blur produced by ocular high-order aberrations

The perceived focus of an image can be strongly biased by prior adaptation to a blurred or sharpened image. We examined whether these adaptation effects can occur for the natural patterns of retinal image blur produced by high-order aberrations (HOAs) in the optics of the eye. Focus judgments were measured for 4 subjects to estimate in a forced choice procedure (sharp/blurred) their neutral point after adaptation to different levels of blur produced by scaled increases or decreases in their HOAs. The optical blur was simulated by convolution of the PSFs from the 4 different HOA patterns, with Zernike coefficients (excluding tilt, defocus, and astigmatism) multiplied by a factor between 0 (diffraction limited) and 2 (double amount of natural blur). Observers viewed the images through an Adaptive Optics system that corrected their aberrations and made settings under neutral adaptation to a gray field or after adapting to 5 different blur levels. All subjects adapted to changes in the level of blur imposed by HOA regardless of which observer's HOA was used to generate the stimuli, with the perceived neutral point proportional to the amount of blur in the adapting image.