Eye–Hand Coordination Skills in Children with and without Amblyopia

Abstract

The importance of binocular vision for eye-hand coordination normally increases with age and use of online movement guidance. Restoring binocularity in children with amblyopia may improve their poor hand action control.

Amblyopia and Real-World Visuomotor Tasks

“…The other notable differences were that the adults moved faster than the children, particularly when they were amblyopic, and that the affected adults no longer exhibited obvious deficits in their dominant eye performance (Fig.1). This suggests that children with amblyopia can eventually improve their eye-hand coordination skills, perhaps via enhanced action planning acquired through repeated sensory (perceptual) or motor experience, consistent with evidence that cognitive and visuomotor skills normally continue to mature well into adolescence (see Suttle et al, 2011).…”

“…The major finding of Suttle et al (2011) was that the performance of the children with amblyopia was uniformly poor and worse than the controls on parameters reflecting both movement speed and accuracy under all three viewing conditions, including -most surprisingly -with their sound/dominant eye. In general, the amblyopic children programmed slower (i.e., more cautious) movements than the normal subjects and they spent almost twice as long in the final approach to the objects at the end of the reach and in closing and applying their grip, resulting in significantly prolonged movement execution times ( Fig.1).…”

“…Others have taken a different approach to evaluating the eye-hand coordination skills of amblyopic children (Suttle et al, 2011) and adults , involving objective analyses of their movement kinematics. That is, this work investigated detailed spatial and temporal features of the hand movements produced by subjects with the disorder, rather than their overall success.…”

Stereo vision and strabismus

“…Binocular disparity cues help us guide our hand movements precisely [79][80][81][82] and both children and adults with impaired stereo vision perform worse on a range of visuomotor tasks than their peers with normal stereoacuity. [83][84][85][86][87][88][89][90] Stereoacuity has also been linked to better reading ability, 91,92 perhaps because both stereopsis and reading require precise control of eye movements. 93 Untreated children with infantile esotropia lag behind on developmental milestones but catch up following early alignment surgery (in the first year of life), 94 an outcome that the authors attribute to better binocular vision and stereopsis.…”

Amblyopia: neural basis and therapeutic approaches

“…There may be abnormal function of the fellow normal eye as well. Overall, there is di minished capacity to generate a tridimensional representation of the world adequate to coordinate manipulation (eye-hand coordination), reading, and visual decision making (4)(5)(6)(7)(8) . Amblyopia has no detectable organic cause (9) but occurs as a re sult of visual deprivation (congenital cataracts; ametropia) and/or abnormal binocular interaction (strabismus; anisometropia) (10) .…”