Having
a designated driver on hand while drinking is an important part of
being responsible on the road. Though blood alcohol concentration
restrictions are imposed on drivers, how is our vision affected when we
are under this limit? Researchers in Canada set out to answer this
question and found that our vision is impaired by up to 30% – before we
even hit the legal limit.
The research, published in the journal
Perception, was conducted by Kevin Johnston and Brian Timney, from the
Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry and Western University’s
Social Science department in Ontario.
They say though it is widely known that
alcohol affects decision-making and motor skills, until now, there have
been few studies to analyze how alcohol affects vision.
However, rather than using modern
technology to conduct their research, they employed a 144-year-old
optical illusion, called the Hermann Grid.
This illusion was described by Ludimar Hermann, a German physiologist, in 1870.
Johnston explains how the illusion works,
“The Hermann Grid is basically a grid of black squares on a white
background. You see ghost-like dark spots at the intersections of the
grid, but they are not actually there. It’s the way our visual system
processes contrast or brightness differences that creates the illusion.”
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