Elsevier

Vision Research

Volume 39, Issue 24, December 1999, Pages 4018-4031
Vision Research

The orientation discrimination deficit in strabismic amblyopia depends upon stimulus bandwidth

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0042-6989(99)00107-8Get rights and content
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Abstract

We show that the previously reported orientation deficit in amblyopia (Skottun, B. C., Bradley, A., & Freeman, R. D. (1986). Orientation discrimination in amblyopia. Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science, 30, 532–537) also occurs for arrays of randomly positioned Gabor micropatterns for which explanations based on either neural disarray or local neural interactions would not hold. Furthermore, when using Gabors, we show that the deficit varies with the spatial frequency and orientational bandwidth of the stimuli used to measure it. We discuss two competing explanations for this, one based on a broader underlying detector bandwidth in amblyopia (both orientation and spatial frequency) and the other based on a selective deficit of first-order, as opposed to second-order orientation processing in strabismic amblyopia. Our results favour the latter interpretation.

Keywords

Orientation discrimination
Amblyopia
Strabismus
Positional uncertainty

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