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Night vision can be affected by several factors: vision not fully corrected, night myopia, poor glare recovery, poor depth perception, color blindness, and dark tints

 

1.     Vision not fully corrected by wearing an old prescription will generally cause more problems at night than during the day, as decreasing light levels reduce your maximum sight.

 

2.     Night myopia is caused by your pupils dilating to let more light into your eyes.  By letting more light in, it also adds more aberrations causing you to become artificially more nearsighted.  If you are one who does a lot of night driving or other night activities that are affected by this you may need stronger prescription designed for these night activities.

 

3.     Glare recovery is the ability of your eyes to quickly adjust from headlights back to the dark.  This may be affected by a few factors.

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Vitamin A

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Smoking has been found to slow this glare recovery response

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A sun prescription worn during the bright days prevents the bleaching of the visual purple and aids in night glare adaptation.

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Look away from the headlights by viewing the painted white lines on the highway.

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Keep your windshield and headlights clean both inside and out.

If you do a lot of night driving and glare does bother you, you may want special glasses that are tinted darker on the left where on‑coming headlights shine while the tint fades to clear on the right enabling you to see.

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Special anti‑reflective coating can reduce the glare and reflection your spectacle lenses

4.       Poor depth perception may be increased at night because if your eyes

do have a      tendency not to work together, this will be exaggerated in a darker setting, as your eyes will have less to see to hold them together. If this happens, you may see double or greatly reduce your depth perception.   Either increases the danger of night driving. Vision therapy can help this problem, and may be recommended by Dr. Baron.

 

5.         Color blindness, especially those who have problems with red/green, must learn to drive slower, as they are actually nearsighted to the color red, so you must be closer to see it than other people.  Red is a very important color for driving. For example: stop signs, tail lights and stop lights.  People with color vision problems will also not see pedestrians or cyclists on the shoulder of the road as soon as others.

 

6.        Darkly tinted lenses worn for night driving have a drastic effect on how well you see, as they cut down what little light is available to see even further away.    

7.         If you have cataracts developing your ability to detect visual contrasts will be decreased and lights will flare making it difficult to drive at night.

 

8.       Anti reflective coating on your glasses will greatly increase the amount of light passing through the lens (88% without and 99% with the anti-reflective coating), while at the same time it will decrease the  reflections and glare from your lenses.

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