Visually impaired people are usually able to navigate busy sidewalks and crosswalks, safely finding their way using nothing more than a cane as a guide. The reason they can do this, researchers suggest, is that in at least some circumstances, blindness can heighten other senses, helping individuals adapt. Now scientists have confirmed that...

A new study investigating alterations in the cerebral neural networks associated with macular degeneration during performance of cognitively demanding tasks finds that the development and use of a preferred retinal locus (PRL) is associated with greater demands on cognitive resources. The authors believe that these increases reflect increased...

Researchers find that elderly persons with low cognitive test scores are twice as likely to have early AMD, suggesting that cognitive impairment may share common age-related pathogenesis and risk factors with early AMD. Alzheimer disease and AMD have long been hypothesized to share a common pathogenesis based on several lines of evidence....

A new study reports that by doing a set of vigorous visual exercises on a computer every day for several months, patients who had gone partially blind as a result of suffering a stroke were able to regain some vision. “We were very surprised when we saw the results from our first patients,” said Krystel Huxlin, who led the study of seven...