The visual accommodation response during concurrent mental activity

Abstract

The direction and magnitude of the human visual accommodation response during concurrent mental activity are investigated. Subject focusing responses to targets at distances of 0.0 D, 3.0 D and an indeterminate distance were monitored by means of an optometer during the performance of a backwards counting task and a visual imagery task (thinking near and thinking far). In both experiments a shift in accommodation towards the visual far point is observed particularly for the near target, which increases with the duration of the task. The results can be interpreted in terms of both the capacity model of Kahneman (1973) and the autonomic arousal model of Hess and Polt (1964), and are not inconsistent with the possibility of an intermediate resting position.