Reading with simulated scotomas: attending to the right is better than attending to the left

Persons with central field loss must learn to read using eccentric retina. To do this, most adopt a preferred retinal locus (PRL), which substitutes for the fovea. Patients who have central field loss due to age-related macular degeneration (AMD), most often adopt PRL adjacent to and to the left of their scotoma in visual field space. It has been hypothesized that this arrangement of PRL and scotoma would benefit reading. We tested this hypothesis by asking normally-sighted subjects to read with the left or right half of their visual field plus 3.2 degrees in the contralateral field masked from view. Letter identification, word identification, and reading were all slower when only the information in the left visual field was available. This was primarily due to the number of saccades required to successfully read to stimuli. These data imply that patients would be better off with PRL to the right of their scotoma than to the left for the purposes of reading.