Abstract
It is commonly assumed that one eye is dominant over the other eye. Such sighting dominance can for example be determined by using the popular hole-in-the-card test. Here, we investigate if preferred sighting eye dominance is linked to sensory eye dominance in several binocular rivalry tasks. For a total of 31 observers we measured eye dominance in the hole-in-the-card test, and left versus right eye differences in first percept onsets during rivalry, in predominance during ongoing rivalry, and in breakthrough times during continuous flash suppression (CFS). Relationships between differences in eye dominance were assessed using Bayesian statistics. We observed no effect of sighting eye dominance on the binocular rivalry tasks. We observed a correlation of eye dominance between onset and ongoing rivalry, but not with CFS. We conclude that sighting eye dominance is different from sensory eye dominance, and that CFS is affected by a different form of eye dominance than onset and ongoing rivalry. Eye dominance seems to be a multifaceted phenomenon, which is differently expressed across interocular conflict tests. We recommend that binocular rivalry studies should not use the hole-in-the-card test or similar sighting dominance tests to determine eye dominance. Instead rivalry studies should add pre-trials of the task at interest to calculate differences between the eyes, if the experimental manipulations require a priori knowledge about eye dominance.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2018