Fixation termination during visual search with simulated visual impairments

Everyday tasks such as finding a friend in a crowd rely on efficient visual search, a process that heavily relies on efficiently executing eye movements. But how does our visual system adapt eye movement behavior when visual input is degraded? Here, we investigated whether eye movement behaviour during visual search adjusts to simulated visual impairments. Participants performed a visual search task whilst their eye movement behaviour was recorded under three conditions: normal vision (control), monocular vision (with an eye patch over the dominant eye), and low-contrast vision (with reduced stimulus contrast). Overall, we found that search was slowed under conditions of simulated visual impairments, with increases in RTs, fixation durations, and time to fixate the target compared with a control condition. Our results provide further support for mixed-control models of fixation termination and have implications for understanding eye movement control under visual impairments.