Monochromatic aberrations in the accommodated human eye.

The wave-front aberration of the human eye was measured for eight subjects using a spatially resolved refractometer (a psychophysical ray-tracing test). The eyes were undilated and presented with accommodative stimuli varying from 0 to -6 diopters. Monochromatic wave-front aberrations tend to increase with increasing levels of accommodation, although there are substantial individual variations in the actual change in the wave-front aberration. While spherical aberration always decreased with increasing accommodation, it did not change from positive to negative for every observer. The direction and amount of change in fourth order aberrations varied between observers. Aberrations with orders higher than fourth are at a minimum near the resting state of accommodation. The accommodation induced change in wavefront aberration was not strongly related to the total amount of aberration in the eight eyes studied.