Psychophysical Studies of the Binocular Processes of Amblyopes

ABSTRACT It has frequently been assumed that humans with abnormal binocular vision resulting from amblyopia or strabismus lack binocular cortical neurons. From this assumption, it would be predicted that amblyopes would fail to show binocular interactions on any psychophysical tasks. This paper describes some recent psychophysical experiments investigating the binocular processes of amblyopes. The results of these experiments have shown that most humans with abnormal binocular vision fail to show binocular interactions for psychophysical tasks such as stereopsis or binocular summation, but show partially normal binocular interactions for interocular transfer of visual aftereffects and show normal interactions for dichoptic masking with grating stimuli.