Monocular and Binocular Temporal Visual Perception of Infantile Nystagmus

Contrast sensitivity is mostly used as a tool for testing aspects of visual functions. Infantile nystagmus is a pathological phenomenon that affects the spatial-temporal visual functions due to spontaneous oscillating movements of the eyes. We examined the spatial-temporal aspects of nystagmus perception, aiming to investigate the mechanisms underlying the deterioration of their visual performance. We tested the monocular and binocular contrast sensitivity of nystagmus and normally sighted subjects by measuring contrast detection of a Gabor target with spatial frequencies slightly above the cutoff threshold of each subject (nystagmus ~3; controls = 9cpd; presentation times 60–480 ms). The dominant eye of nystagmus revealed large differences over the non-dominant eye, highlighting the superiority of the dominant over the non-dominant eye in nystagmus. In addition, binocular summation mechanism was impaired in majority of the nystagmus subjects. Furthermore, these differences are not attributed to differences in visual acuity. Moreover, the visual performance in nystagmus continue to improve for longer presentation time compared with controls and was longer in the poor eye. Since the results are not due to differences in eye movements and strabismus, we suggest that the differences are due to developmental impairment in the visual system during the critical period.