Abstract
Deprivation during the critical period can permanently disrupt vision. Recent studies showed that vision could also be affected when adults were deprived for short durations (Lunghi et al., 2011; Zhou et al., 2013). However, instead of impairment, vision improved temporarily in the deprived eye. It might be expected that monocular deprivation creates a binocular imbalance that should be detrimental to stereopsis. However, a counter-argument is that stereo performance should nevertheless improve, because stereo channels become un-adapted during deprivation. Initial experiments that measured the effects of adult deprivation on stereoacuity were inconclusive, but an improvement in depth perception was noted in the temporal domain. This observation motivated the present study, which measured the time taken to make depth discriminations and the associated confidence levels. Subjects were stereo-normal adults whose stereoacuity was measured with square stimuli defined by disparity within dynamic random dot stereograms, immediately before and after deprivation. A dark patch was worn for 2.5h over the deprived eye, while the undeprived eye was free to view the environment. There was a reduction in response time to trials between 30s and the first minute post-deprivation. It returned to baseline thereafter. This reduction was accompanied by an increase in the reported confidence levels but not in stereoacuity. These results may be explained by two processes with different time-courses: the recovery from interocular imbalance just following deprivation, and then re-adaptation to stereocopic disparities.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2018