Visually Impaired Adults Can Accurately Judge Arrival Time of Approaching Vehicles

WEDNESDAY, Jan. 7, 2026 (HealthDay News) — People with central vision loss can judge arrival time of approaching vehicles almost as accurately as people with normal vision, according to a study published online Dec. 4 in PLOS ONE.

Patricia R. DeLucia, from Rice University in Houston, and colleagues measured the contribution of visual and auditory cues during time-to-collision judgments made by people with age-related macular degeneration versus a control group without age-related macular degeneration, using a virtual reality system to simulate a roadway with an approaching vehicle viewed from the perspective of a pedestrian.

The researchers found that in the vision-only modality condition, the relative importance of distance and optical size compared with time-to-collision was higher in the impaired vision group versus the normal vision group, although the effect size was relatively small. For car presentation both visually and aurally, the mean absolute error of time-to-collision estimates was similar between groups, with no multimodal advantage seen. In the impaired vision group, intraindividual variability was greater only in the audio-visual condition.

“Our results indicate that even reduced central vision still provides useful information for judging approaching objects,” coauthor Daniel Oberfeld, from Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz in Germany, said in a statement. “People with age-related macular degeneration continue to benefit from their residual vision instead of relying solely on auditory cues.”

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