Temporal instability in the perception of strabismic amblyopia

Amblyopia is a developmental disorder of spatial vision resulting from an abnormal visual stimulation in early childhood. The aim of our study was to investigate the spatial and temporal distortions that occur in strabismic and anisometropic amblyopic vision. The main focus was on the temporal instability of amblyopic perception of low and high spatial frequencies. Our results indicate that temporal instability is perceived mainly by strabismic and strabismic-anisometropic amblyopes and occurs only at high spatial frequencies. We found two categories of temporal distortions in high spatial frequency patterns: a) the whole pattern is perceived as jittering, b) single lines or parts in a pattern are perceived as moving. Our data suggest that strabismus, in addition to amblyopia, is needed to elicit significant temporal distortions.