Visual Processing Speed and How to Train It
Brainpro is an eye training app for iPhone. It runs four guided visual drills, smooth pursuit, gaze stabilization, saccades and peripheral vision, in a three minute daily session, and records how eye control changes from one session to the next.
Two people can have identical eyesight on a chart and read a moving scene at completely different speeds. The chart measures how much detail can be resolved when everything holds still. Almost nothing in real life holds still, and the useful capability is how fast usable information is extracted from what arrives.
Three things that get confused with each other
| Capability | What it measures | How it is tested |
|---|---|---|
| Visual acuity | Detail resolved at a fixed distance | An eye chart, static, one distance |
| Visual processing speed | How fast usable information is extracted | Brief presentation tasks, often with a distractor |
| Reaction time | Processing plus selecting and executing a response | A stimulus and a button |
An eye exam covers the first row. It is the row least connected to how well someone reads a crowded scene, which is why people with perfect acuity still miss things that were plainly there.
What slows it down
Two things, mostly. The first is how long it takes to get the eyes onto the thing worth looking at, which is detection at the edge of the field followed by an accurate jump. The second is how long the picture takes to settle once they arrive, which depends on how stable the fixation is.
Both are movement problems rather than perception problems, and both are directly trainable. That is the practical reason vision training aims at the movements: the extraction gets faster when the information arrives sooner and holds still on arrival.
The drills work on getting the eyes there sooner and holding them steadier once they arrive.
Download Brainpro on the App Store Free to download. iPhone, iOS 16 and later.Why it narrows under load
Under stress or fatigue, attention pulls toward the centre of the field. The edge keeps arriving and stops being used, so less of the scene is available to extract from in the first place. This is why processing feels slower late in a day or late in a game without anything having changed about the eyes themselves.
What training looks like
Peripheral work keeps the field wide under load. Saccade work shortens acquisition. Fixation stability shortens the settling time after arrival. Pursuit keeps moving objects on the centre of vision instead of repeatedly re-acquiring them. Those four together are the session, and they are aimed at the specific delays rather than at a score.
Measuring change honestly
Comparing a score against someone else's on a different test is meaningless, because tests differ in presentation time, distractors and response method. Comparing yourself against yourself on the same test, under the same conditions, at the same time of day, is the only version of this that carries information.
Questions people ask
What is visual processing speed?
How quickly usable information is extracted from what the eyes deliver. It is separate from visual acuity, which is how much detail can be resolved, and from reaction time, which includes the movement at the end.
Is visual processing speed the same as IQ?
No. It is a specific perceptual capability, not a general measure of intelligence, and it varies independently of it.
Does visual processing speed decline with age?
It tends to, and it is also one of the more responsive capabilities to targeted practice at any age. Brainpro trains the eye movements that feed it rather than making claims about age.
How is it different from reaction time?
Reaction time includes selecting and executing a response. Processing speed stops at the point where the information has been extracted and is usable.