Increment-threshold spectral sensitivity functions were determined during the dominance and suppression phases of binocular rivalry. The shapes of the functions obtained during the dominance phase exhibited three maxima at approximately 440, 530, and 610 nanometers and resembled functions obtained for nonrivalrous control conditions. However, the functions measured during suppression had a single broad peak near 555 nanometers and were adequately described by functions measured with flicker methods during nonrivalrous conditions. The results indicate that binocular rivalry differentially attenuates opponent-color information relative to achromatic information.
Accommodation, or the change in refractive power of the eye to focus objects at different distances, is driven by many stimuli including defocus blur, the awareness of target distance or proximal cues, and through the vergence crosslink (convergence accommodation). The effectiveness of defocus blur as an accommodative stimulus is decreased in normally-sighted subjects as visual acuity is experimentally reduced and as the target is imaged at increasing eccentricities from the fovea. Since subjects with central retinal abnormalities have reduced visual acuity and typically fixate eccentrically, one would predict that defocus blur would not be an effective accommodative stimulus for them. Using an infrared optometer, steady-state accommodative responses of six subjects with juvenile macular degeneration (JMD) and of three normally-sighted controls were measured. The effectiveness of defocus blur in stimulating accommodation varied across the subjects and was related to visual acuity, with those subjects having worse acuity showing less accurate accommodative responses. When provided with additional cues to accommodative demand (i.e. proximal and/or binocular cues), subjects with JMD showed more accurate accommodative responses. In general, those subjects who did not modulate accommodative response with changing defocus blur cues showed the most accurate accommodation under binocular viewing. In contrast, those subjects who did change accommodative response with changing defocus blur cues showed the most accurate accommodation under monocular viewing.
Despite a reduction of nystagmus at near distances in many patients with IN, the visual acuity at near does not improve significantly. These results imply that visual acuity in patients with IN is determined primarily by sensory limitations rather than by the moment-by-moment characteristics of these patients' eye movements.
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