Abstract EN:

Decreased visual motion sensitivity in early stages of primary open angle glaucoma suggests that this pathology may impair complex visuo-cognitive tasks involving the magnocellular pathway and the dorsal cortical pathway that are specialized in motion analysis. This work is testing this hypothesis. In the first part, we demonstrated that saccades toward a static or a moving target are impaired. Saccade’s latencies are increased in early and moderate stages of glaucoma when the target is static, and even more when the target is moving. Saccade’s accuracy is decreased only in moderate stages of glaucoma when the target is static and in both early and moderate stages when the target is moving. In a second part, we used bistable stimuli to test neural processes of integration and segregation of complex visual motion. Glaucoma patients had fewer transitions between the 2 possible percepts for stimuli using contrast variations to induce bistability, although they did experience bistable motion with different stimuli. The quality of pursuit and fixation were decreased in glaucoma patients. Altogether these results show that glaucoma alters complex visuo-cognitive tasks before the detection of a scotoma by standard automated perimetry. The results suggest a diffuse impairment of the cortical and sub-cortical networks involved in eye movement, particularly in saccades. These anomalies could be the functional correlates of structural transsynaptic changes found in the superior colliculus, in the lateral geniculate nucleus and in the visual cortex. Our work indicates that evaluation of eye movements might be a useful marker of early damages of the anterior visual pathway in glaucoma.