Meier Kimberly, Warner Simon, Spering Miriam, Giaschi Deborah
College of Optometry, University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA.
Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
Sci Rep. 2025 Jan 25;15(1):3183. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-83624-9.
People with amblyopia show deficits in global motion perception, especially at slow speeds. These observers are also known to have unstable fixation when viewing stationary fixation targets, relative to healthy controls. It is possible that poor fixation stability during motion viewing interferes with the fidelity of the input to motion-sensitive neurons in visual cortex. To probe these mechanisms at a behavioral level, we assessed motion coherence thresholds in adults with amblyopia while measuring fixation stability. Consistent with prior work, participants with amblyopia had elevated coherence thresholds for the slow speed stimuli, but not the fast speed stimuli, using either the amblyopic or the fellow eye. Fixation stability was elevated in the amblyopic eye relative to controls across all motion stimuli, and not selective for conditions on which perceptual deficits were observed. Fixation stability was not related to visual acuity, nor did it predict coherence thresholds. These results suggest that motion perception deficits might not be a result of poor input to the motion processing system due to unstable fixation, but rather due to processing deficits in motion-sensitive visual areas.
弱视患者在整体运动感知方面存在缺陷，尤其是在低速情况下。相对于健康对照组，这些观察者在观看固定注视目标时也存在注视不稳定的情况。在观看运动时，注视稳定性差可能会干扰视觉皮层中对运动敏感神经元的输入保真度。为了在行为层面探究这些机制，我们在测量注视稳定性的同时评估了成人弱视患者的运动连贯性阈值。与先前的研究一致，弱视患者在使用弱视眼或健侧眼观看时，对低速刺激的连贯性阈值升高，但对高速刺激则不然。在所有运动刺激中，弱视眼的注视稳定性相对于对照组有所提高，并且对观察到感知缺陷的条件没有选择性。注视稳定性与视力无关，也不能预测连贯性阈值。这些结果表明，运动感知缺陷可能不是由于注视不稳定导致运动处理系统输入不良的结果，而是由于对运动敏感的视觉区域的处理缺陷所致。
