Reading and Contrast Adaptation

Abstract

Lunn and Banks (1986), studying the reasons for “visual fatigue” among users of video text displays, found that reading from a video display caused a tenfold elevation of the contrast threshold for a sinusoidal grating with the same spatial frequency as the lines of text. They suggested that this may contribute to “visual fatigue,” possibly by affecting accommodation, but they did not explain why printed text would not have the same effect.