People with glaucoma often struggle to see in dim lighting, but standard vision tests don’t always capture these everyday challenges. One overlooked factor may be visual crowding. Visual crowding, which is the difficulty of recognizing objects when surrounded by other elements, is elevated in individuals with glaucoma. Could this effect worsen under low-light conditions, and might it serve as an early functional marker of glaucoma?
The new research project GLANCE (Glaucoma: Luminance And Crowding Evaluation) aims to find out. GLANCE will investigate how low luminance interacts with visual crowding in individuals with glaucoma, with the goal of developing better tools to assess functional vision loss.
GLANCE has been awarded €70,000 through the UitZicht funding program, with contributions from Stichting Oogfonds Nederland and the Landelijke Stichting voor Blinden en Slechtzienden. The project will be carried out at the Laboratory of Experimental Ophthalmology of the University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG) by Dilce Tanriverdi, in collaboration with Frans Cornelissen and Nomdo Jansonius.
What is peripheral visual crowding? On the right, when fixating the cross, notice that the ‘5’ is easy to see in isolation, but hard when surrounded by other numbers. The left image shows an artistic rendering of what a crowded scene might look like to someone with a visual field defect due to glaucoma. In the Glance project, the researchers will study whether crowding is worse under low light compared to more bright light conditions, in glaucoma.