Grant: Project Grant

Amblyopia is characterized by the loss or attenuation of vision in one eye despite the eye being normal and healthy. Currently, most approaches to understanding amblyopia treat this disorder as one where all vision in the amblyopic eye is suppressed. This idea holds insofar as it describes the main symptoms of amblyopia, but it does not explain the many ways in which vision in the amblyopic eye is integrated with that of the dominant eye. For example, peripheral vision is largely unaffected in amblyopia, as is vision for more blurred patterns or moving patterns. We propose a different paradigm for understanding amblyopia--we propose that amblyopia involves the selective integration of information from the two eyes, a process we call adaptive compensation. The process is adaptive because it requires suppression to be modulated by the specific stimuli present in a given scene, and compensatory because it seeks to make up for vision lost in the amblyopic eye. The adaptive compensatory model explains many features of amblyopia and makes important predictions as to how vision in amblyopia can be improved through training.