Abstract

A key limitation shared by both electronic and optogenetic sight recovery technologies is that they cause simultaneous rather than complementary firing within on- and off-center cells. Here, using ‘virtual patients’ - sighted individuals viewing distorted input - we examine whether ‘gamified training’ improves the ability to compensate for distortions in neuronal population coding. We measured perceptual learning using dichoptic input, filtered so that regions of the image that produced on-center responses in one eye produced off-center responses in the other eye. The Non-Gaming control group carried out an object discrimination task over 5 sessions using this filtered input. The Gaming group carried out an additional 25 hours of ‘gamified’ training using a similarly filtered variant of the videogame Fruit NinjaTM. Both groups showed improvements over time in the object discrimination task. However, there was no significant transfer of learning from the ‘Fruit Ninja’ task to the object discrimination task. This lack of transfer of learning between the two tasks suggests that gamification-based rehabilitation for sight recovery technologies may have limited utility, and may be most effective when targeted on learning specific visual tasks.