Sensitivity to Visual Motion in Amblyopic Macaque Monkeys

Amblyopia is usually considered to be a deficit in spatial vision. But there is evidence that amblyopes may also suffer specific deficits in motion sensitivity as opposed to losses that can be explained by the known deficits in spatial vision. We measured sensitivity to visual motion in random dot displays for strabismic and anisometropic amblyopic monkeys. We used a wide range of spatial and temporal offsets and compared the performance of the fellow and amblyopic eye for each monkey. The amblyopes were severely impaired at detecting motion at fine spatial and long temporal offsets, corresponding to fine spatial scale and slow speeds. This impairment was also evident for the untreated fellow eyes of strabismic but not anisometropic amblyopes. Motion sensitivity functions for amblyopic eyes were shifted toward large spatial scales for amblyopic compared to fellow eyes, to a degree that was correlated with the shift in scale of the spatial contrast sensitivity function. Amblyopic losses in motion sensitivity, however, were not correlated with losses in spatial contrast sensitivity. This, combined with the specific impairment for detecting long temporal offsets, reveals a deficit in spatiotemporal integration in amblyopia which cannot be explained by the lower spatial resolution of amblyopic vision.