A New Quantitative Indicator of Visual Fatigue

Ocular-motor correlates of visual fatigue have remained elusive. Performance of ocular-motor tracking with a wide-band white noise input and the response of the dual-mode, smooth pursuit-saccadic eye movement system as output was used to test visual fatigue. A new visual fatigue indicator, VFI, was defined as the nonlinear remnant after subtracting an identified impulse response contribution to the output. Subjects were required to perform very fatiguing CRT screen reading tasks, and the VFI correlated well with the subjective reports of visual fatigue.