Saccades in the absence of binocular vision

The mechanism of suppression in strabismus is unclear and contribution of the suppressing eye to the generation of eye movements has received little attention. A series of nine experiments tested how the strabismic eye contributes to saccade generation in the presence of suppression and also considered the effect of the strabismic eye in the presence of abnormal retinal correspondence (ARC). These data were compared with data from subjects with normal binocular single vision (BSV). Chapters 2 and 3 describe the equipment, laboratory set-up and testing of the equipment used in the thesis for measuring eye movements, Skalar IRIS 6500 infrared limbal tracker, and presenting stimuli to each eye separately. The design of a novel method for dissociation of the eyes using four liquid crystal polymer shutters is presented. Chapter 4 compares the characteristics of saccades made by subjects with normal BSV (n=5) and strabismus (n=8). The effect of distractors on saccades is explored in Chapter 5 in subjects with normal BSV (n=5). The experiment documents the distractor effect produced in the described laboratory set-up, and compares it with that previously reported by Walker et al (1997). This is investigated further by comparing the effect of distractor presentations to the dominant eye, non-dominant eye or both eyes. There was no difference in the effect on saccade latency or gain with distractors presented to the dominant or non-dominant eye. The effect of binocular distractors on saccade gain was greater than monocular presentations. Chapter 6 repeats the experiment of Chapter 5 in subjects with constant strabismus and suppression (n=6) and constant strabismus with ARC (n=2) and found that distractors in the strabismic eye did affect saccades however the response differed from normal BSV. This was true even though it was shown that the distractor was not perceived by the strabismic eye. Chapter 7 investigates the influence of the central fixation target in the strabismic eye on saccade generation by inducing disconjugate saccade adaptation in subjects with normal BSV (n=8) and constant strabismus and suppression (n=6). The findings were that in the presence of suppression, disconjugate adaptation similar to that in normal BSV was possible. The conclusion of this thesis is to suggest that information from the suppressed eye is available to the saccadic system by either a sub-cortical pathway or processed cortically without conscious awareness.