Assessing binocular cooperation with patchwork stimuli

This study investigated binocular cooperation with patchwork stimuli,which were constructed by cutting a picture into patches, presenting some patches to one eye and presenting the remaining patches to the fellow eye. Reconstruction of the original picture requires subjects to combine information from the two eyes, and therefore tests the quality of their binocular cooperation. The strength of cooperation was measured by presenting closed contours in patchwork form, and asking adult human subjects to discriminate between distorted and undistorted contours. Both normal and strabismic subjects were tested. The strabismic subjects required a distortion amplitude fivefold that of the normal subjects to achieve the same level of discrimination. Further, the binocular performance of the strabismic subjects was largely determined by their performance when using only the non-strabismic eye. These results suggest that patchwork stimuli may be useful in clinical tests for binocular cooperation.