Psychophysical Consequences of Image Degradation and Binocular Misregistration on the Developing Visual Nervous System

Amblyopia represents a developmental abnormality of the “spatial sense” resulting from image degradation and/or binocular image misregistration early in life. Clinicians generally consider spatial vision in terms of Snellen acuity, with a limiting acuity of about 20/20 (i.e. critical detail of about 1′); however, the visual system is capable of making much finer spatial discriminations. For example, relative position, size and orientation can be judged with an accuracy of 3 to 6 arc seconds or better (Klein and Levi, 1985). These low spatial thresholds are 5 to 10 times finer than either the cutoff spatial frequency or the intercone spacing. For this reason, Westheimer (1975) has coined the term “hyperacuity” to describe a variety of tasks that involve sensing the direction of spatial offset of a line or point relative to a reference.

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