Background: The image formed by the eye's optics is blurred by the ocular aberrations, specific to each eye. Recent studies demonstrated that the eye is adapted to the level of blur produced by the high order aberrations (HOA). We examined whether visual coding is also adapted to the orientation of the natural HOA of the eye.
Methods and findings: Judgments of perceived blur were measured in 5 subjects in a psychophysical procedure inspired by the "Classification Images" technique. Subjects were presented 500 pairs of images, artificially blurred with HOA from 100 real eyes (i.e. different orientations), with total blur level adjusted to match the subject's natural blur. Subjects selected the image that appeared best focused in each random pair, in a 6-choice ranked response. Images were presented through Adaptive Optics correction of the subject's aberrations. The images selected as best focused were identified as positive, the other as negative responses. The highest classified positive responses correlated more with the subject's Point Spread Function, PSF, (r = 0.47 on average) than the negative (r = 0.34) and the difference was significant for all subjects (p<0.02). Using the orientation of the best fitting ellipse of angularly averaged integrated PSF intensities (weighted by the subject's responses) we found that in 4 subjects the positive PSF response was close to the subject's natural PSF orientation (within 21 degrees on average) whereas the negative PSF response was almost perpendicularly oriented to the natural PSF (at 76 degrees on average).
Conclusions: The Classification-Images inspired method is very powerful in identifying the internally coded blur of subjects. The consistent bias of the Positive PSFs towards the natural PSF in most subjects indicates that the internal code of blur appears rather specific to each subject's high order aberrations and reveals that the calibration mechanisms for normalizing blur also operate using orientation cues.