PURPOSE To review what is known about the normal maturational sequence for fusion and stereopsis and the binocular sensory deficits associated with accommodative esotropia (ET) and to explore the clues that accommodative ET provides about critical periods for binocular sensory function. METHODS Studies of binocular sensory function during infancy and early childhood are presented. RESULTS M...

Neural imaging studies have found the connection between strabismus and brain cortex. However, the pathological mechanisms of intermittent exotropia are still not fully understood. In the present study, changes of binocular fusion related cortices in intermittent exotropia were investigated with blood oxygen level dependent functional magnetic resonance imaging. Activated cortices induced by fu...

THE MACH-DVORAK PHENOMENON AND BINOCULAR FUSION OF MOVING STIMULI

The performance of depth reconstruction in binocular stereo relies on how adequate the predefined baseline for a target scene is. Wide-baseline stereo is capable of discriminating depth better than the narrow-baseline stereo, but it often suffers from spatial artifacts. Narrow-baseline stereo can provide a more elaborate depth map with fewer artifacts, while its depth resolution tends to be bia...

Latent nystagmus (LN) is the by-product of fusion maldevelopment in infancy. Because fusion maldevelopment--in the form of strabismus and amblyopia--is common, LN is a prevalent form of pathologic nystagmus encountered in clinical practice. It originates as an afferent visual pathway disorder. To unravel the mechanism for LN, we studied patients and nonhuman primates with maldeveloped fusion. T...

Horizontal binocular disparity is the fundamental stimulus for both fusional vergence and stereopsis, but whether common disparity-sensitive mechanisms are involved in both responses is unknown. To determine whether the sensitivities of motor and sensory fusion are interdependent, we studied vergence eye movements and depth discrimination, using stimuli with haplopic binocular disparities, in s...

Binocular rivalry is an intriguing phenomenon: when different images are displayed to the two eyes, perception alternates between these two images. What determines whether two monocular images engage in fusion or in rivalry: the physical difference between these images or the difference between the percepts resulting from the images? We investigated that question by measuring the interocular di...