Interocular Suppression as Revealed by Dichoptic Masking Is Orientation-Dependent and Imbalanced in Amblyopia

We investigate the orientation tuning of interocular suppression using a dichoptic masking paradigm in adult controls and amblyopes.

Fourteen adults with anisometropic or mixed amblyopia and 10 control adults participated in our study. Contrast sensitivity was measured by presenting a target Gabor in the tested eye and mean luminance in the untested eye (monocular) and by presenting a target in the tested eye and a bandpass oriented filtered noise in the other eye (masked). Interocular suppression was defined as the thresholds difference between the monocular and masked conditions for each eye. Interocular suppression was measured under parallel and orthogonal suppression configurations. The peak spatial frequency of the target and mask was 0.25 c/d in experiment 1 (low), 1.31 c/d in experiment 2 (mid), and 6.87 c/d in experiment 3 (high).

The masking suppression induced by the amblyopic eye was less strong than that induced by the fellow eye. The suppression from the fellow eye was similar to that observed in the controls. Interocular suppression under parallel configuration was less strong than under orthogonal configuration in amblyopes at low and mid spatial frequency, but not at high spatial frequency.

We demonstrate that the abnormal interocular masking in amblyopia displays the expected characteristic of orientation selectivity expected of normal controls at low and mid spatial frequency, but not at high spatial frequency. The dichoptic masking imbalance between the eyes of amblyopes results in a net suppression of the amblyopic eye during binocular viewing, modeling clinical suppression.