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Review
. 2019 Oct:29:199-204.
doi: 10.1016/j.copsyc.2019.03.011. Epub 2019 Mar 22.

Attention deficits in Amblyopia

Preeti Verghese  1 , Suzanne P McKee  2 , Dennis M Levi  3
Affiliations
Review

Attention deficits in Amblyopia

Preeti Verghese et al. Curr Opin Psychol. 2019 Oct.

Abstract

Amblyopia is a neuro-developmental abnormality associated with deficits in a broad range of both low-level and high-level visual tasks. This is particularly true in strabismic amblyopia where fixation is unstable and there is an increased frequency of microsaccades. In light of the close association between eye movements and attention, we propose a novel hypothesis: that the cost of unstable fixation in amblyopia is a deficit in selective attention. The increased latency for saccades and manual response time with amblyopic-eye viewing is consistent with attention being distracted by unwanted fixational eye movements. We review other attention deficits in amblyopia and discuss whether they are explained by fixation instability, or whether they involve a form of neglect or suppression of the visual input from the amblyopic eye.

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References

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    1. Levi DM (2013). Linking assumptions in amblyopia. Visual Neuroscience, 30: 277–287.

      ** This review examines the links between sensory deficits in amblyopia and single cell responses in area V1 and shows that many visual deficits in amblyopia are not easily captured by a simple loss of contrast sensitivity in V1 neurons. Other factors such as higher noise, poorer efficiency, and inappropriate pooling play a role and may involve higher cortical areas. This review indicates that the cortical neural losses that have been documented thus far do not completely account for the visual deficits in amblyopia.

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