UC Berkeley

Amblyopia is a neuro-developmental abnormality associated with deficits in a broad range of both low-level and high-level visual tasks. This is particularly true in strabismic amblyopia where fixation is unstable and there is an increased frequency of microsaccades. In light of the close association between eye movements and attention, we propose a novel hypothesis: that the cost of unstable fixation in amblyopia is a deficit in selective attention. The increased latency for saccades and manual response time with amblyopic-eye viewing is consistent with attention being distracted by unwanted fixational eye movements. We review other attention deficits in amblyopia and discuss whether they are explained by fixation instability, or whether they involve a form of neglect or suppression of the visual input from the amblyopic eye.