We measured the effect of the correction of the natural aberrations of the eye by means of adaptive optics on the subject's performance on three different visual tasks: subjective sharpness assessment of natural images, familiar face recognition, and facial expression recognition. Images were presented through a dedicated psychophysical channel and viewed through an electromagnetic deformable mirror. Experiments were performed on 17 normal subjects. Ocular aberrations (astigmatism and higher order aberrations) were reduced on average from 0.366 ?± 0.154 to 0.101 ?± 0.055 ??m for a 5-mm pupil diameter. On average, subjects considered to be sharper 84 ?± 14% of the images viewed under AO correction, and there was a significant correlation between the amount of corrected aberrations and the percentage of images that the subject considered sharper when observed under AO-corrected aberrations. In all eyes (except one), AO correction improved familiar face recognition, by a factor of ??1.13 ?± 0.12 on average. However, AO correction did not improve systematically facial expression recognition.
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