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. 2022 May 25:14:833150.
doi: 10.3389/fnagi.2022.833150. eCollection 2022.

Perceptual Grouping During Binocular Rivalry in Mild Glaucoma

Galia Issashar Leibovitzh  1 , Graham E Trope  1   2 , Yvonne M Buys  1   2 , Luminita Tarita-Nistor  1
Affiliations

Perceptual Grouping During Binocular Rivalry in Mild Glaucoma

Galia Issashar Leibovitzh et al. Front Aging Neurosci. .

Abstract

Purpose: This study tested perceptual grouping during binocular rivalry to probe the strength of neural connectivity of the visual cortex involved in early visual processing in patients with mild glaucoma.

Methods: Seventeen patients with mild glaucoma with no significant visual field defects and 14 healthy controls participated. Rivalry stimuli were 1.8°-diameter discs, containing horizontal or vertical sine-wave gratings, viewed dichoptically. To test the grouping, two spatially separated identical stimuli were presented eccentrically to the same or different eyes and to the same or different hemifields. The outcome measures were the time of exclusive dominance of the grouped percept (i.e., percept with synchronized orientations), the rivalry rate, and the epochs of exclusive dominance.

Results: For both groups, the grouping occurred primarily for the matching orientations in the same eye/same hemifield (MO SE/SH) and for the matching orientations in the same eye/different hemifield (MO SE/DH) conditions. Time dominance of the grouped percept of the glaucoma group was similar to that of the control group in all conditions. The rivalry rates in the MO SE/SH and MO SE/DH conditions were significantly larger in the control group than in the glaucoma group. The epochs of exclusive dominance of the grouped percept in the MO SE/SH condition were a median of 48-ms longer for the control group, but a median of 116-ms shorter for the glaucoma group when compared to those in the MO SE/DH condition.

Conclusion: Patients with mild glaucoma show clear impairments in binocular rivalry while evidence for deficits in perceptual grouping could be inferred only indirectly. If these deficits truly exist, they may have implications for higher levels of visual processing, such as object recognition and scene segmentation, but these predictions remain to be tested in future studies.

Keywords: binocular rivalry; glaucoma; grouping; neural connectivity; optic neuropathy; visual processing.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Stimuli and viewing conditions. Perceptual grouping during the binocular rivalry was tested in the following viewing conditions: (A) MO SE/SH; (B) MO SE/DH; (C) MO DE/SH; (D) MO DE/DH.
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
Instructions for percept dominance responses. Examples of the possible rivalry percepts and instructions on how to press buttons of the response box.
FIGURE 3
FIGURE 3
Time of exclusive percept dominance. Time dominance for the grouped, ungrouped, and mixed percept for the four rivalry conditions are shown in (A–C), respectively. Grouped percept is the percept in which the orientations of the sinewave gratings are synchronized for both rivalry targets, as shown on the right of (A) for the same SH and different hemifields (DH). For the ungrouped percept, these orientations are not synchronized. (D) Includes the time of exclusive horizontal or vertical percept dominance for the central-control condition and that of the mixed percept for the same condition, respectively. Error bars are ± 1 SE.
FIGURE 4
FIGURE 4
Rivalry rate for the grouped percept in the MO SE/SH and MO SE/DH conditions. Also shown, the rivalry rate for the central-control condition. Error bars are ± 1 SE.
FIGURE 5
FIGURE 5
Epochs of the grouped percept dominance. Boxplots showing the difference in epochs of grouped percept dominance between MO SE/DH and MO SE/SH conditions for glaucoma and control group. The cross and the horizontal line inside the box represent the mean and the median, respectively. For the glaucoma group, data point shown as a small circle above the box plot’s whisker represents an outlier. The bottom and the top line of the box represent the first and third quartile, respectively.
FIGURE 6
FIGURE 6
Diagrams of button-response box responses. Diagrams of epochs of exclusive dominance plotted from actual data produced by a patient with early glaucoma, in one of the MO SE/DH conditions. The small overlap of the right and left buttons in the “on” position (i.e., value “1”) indicates the change in percept dominance (i.e., probable wave dominance). This overlap was excluded from the epoch’s duration calculation.
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