Individual variation in inter-ocular suppression and sensory eye dominance.

Individual variation in inter-ocular suppression and sensory eye dominance.
Vision Res. 2019 Jul 30;:
Authors: Wang M, McGraw P, Ledgeway T
Abstract
The competitive and inhibitory interactions between the two eyes' images are a pervasive aspect of binocular vision. Over the last decade, our understanding of the neural processes underpinning binocular rivalry (BR) and continuous flash suppression (CFS) has increased substantially, but we still have little understanding of the relationship between these two effects and their variation in the general population. Studies that pool data across individuals and eyes risk masking substantial variations in binocular vision that exist in the general population. To investigate this issue we compared the depth of inter-ocular suppression evoked by BR with that elicited by CFS, in a group (N=25) of visually normal individuals. A noise pattern (either static for BR or dynamic for CFS) was presented to one eye and its suppressive influence on a probe grating presented simultaneously to the other eye was measured. We found substantial individual differences in the magnitude of suppression (a 10-fold variation in probe detection threshold) evoked by each task, but performance on BR was a significant predictor of performance on the CFS task. However many individuals showed marked asymmetries between the two eyes' ability to detect a suppressed target, that were not necessarily the same for the two tas...

Source: Vision Research - July 29, 2019 Category: Opthalmology Authors: Wang M, McGraw P, Ledgeway T Tags: Vision Res Source Type: research