Fixational drift and nasal-temporal pursuit asymmetries in strabismic amblyopes

Abstract

This study evaluated to what extent inaccurate and asymmetric smooth pursuit in strabismic amblyopic eyes is attributable to abnormally high-velocity eye drifts that these eyes exhibit during monocular fixation. Smooth pursuit gains (peak eye velocity/peak target velocity) were determined in the amblyopic and nonamblyopic eyes of 11 strabismics for nasalward and temporalward motion; the target oscillated across 6 degrees of the horizontal meridian at frequencies ranging from 0.0625 to 1 Hz. In general, pursuit gains were higher for nasalward than temporalward motion, for both amblyopic and nonamblyopic eyes. Correction for each eye's mean velocity of fixational drift eliminated this nasal-temporal pursuit asymmetry for most of the nonamblyopic eyes, but not for the amblyopic eyes. Compared to the nonamblyopic eyes, corrected pursuit gains of the amblyopic eyes averaged about 0.2 lower nasalward and about 0.4 lower temporalward, but substantial variation occurred among individuals. We suggest that the overall reduction of pursuit gain in strabismic amblyopic eyes (after correction is made for fixational drift bias) stems from the use of a nonfoveal (eccentric fixation) locus for tracking; the further reduction of temporalward gain may result from a nasal-temporal asymmetry in processing motion signals.