Binocularity is a fundamental property of primate vision. Ocular dominance describes the perceptual weight given to the inputs from the two eyes in their binocular combination. There is a distribution of sensory dominance within the normal binocular population with most subjects having balanced inputs while some are dominated by the left eye and some by the right eye. Using short-term monocular deprivation, the sensory dominance can be modulated as, under these conditions, the patched eye's contribution is strengthened. We address two questions: Is this strengthening a general effect such that it is seen for different types of sensory processing? And is the strengthening specific to pattern deprivation, or does it also occur for light deprivation? Our results show that the strengthening effect is a general finding involving a number of sensory functions, and it occurs as a result of both pattern and light deprivation.

Amblyopia is a developmental disorder that results in deficits of monocular and binocular vision. It is presently unclear whether these deficits result from attenuation of signals in the amblyopic eye, inhibition by signals in the fellow eye, or both. In this study, we characterize mechanisms underlying anisometropic amblyopia using a binocular phase and contrast combination paradigm and a contrast gain control model. Subjects dichoptically viewed two slightly different images and reported the perceived contrast and phase of the resulting cyclopean percept. We found that the properties of binocular combination were abnormal in many aspects in amblyopic vision. The observed abnormalities can be explained by a combination of (1) attenuated monocular signal in the amblyopic eye, (2) stronger interocular contrast gain control from the fellow eye to the signal in the amblyopic eye (direct interocular inhibition), and (3) stronger interocular contrast gain control from the fellow eye to the contrast gain control signal from the amblyopic eye (indirect interocular inhibition). We conclude that anisometropic amblyopia led to both monocular and interocular deficits. A complete understanding of the mechanisms underlying amblyopia requires studies of both monocular deficits and binocular interactions.

Using a suprathreshold binocular summation paradigm developed by J. Ding and G. Sperling (2006, 2007) for normal observers, we investigated suprathreshold cyclopean perception in anisometropic amblyopia. In this paradigm, two suprathreshold sinewave gratings of the same spatial frequency but different spatial phases are presented to the left and right eyes of the observer. The perceived phase of the binocularly combined cyclopean image is measured as a function of the contrast ratio between the images in the two eyes. We found that both eyes contributed equally in normal subjects. However, stimulus of equal contrast was weighted much less in the amblyopic eye relative to the fellow eye in binocular combination. For the five amblyopes, the effective contrast of the amblyopic eye in binocular combination is equal to about 11%–28% of the same contrast presented to the fellow eye, much less than the ratio of contrast sensitivity between the two eyes (0.73–1.42). The results from the current study have many important implications in amblyopia research and treatment.

R, a programming language, is an attractive tool for data visualization because it is free and open source. However, learning R can be intimidating and cumbersome for many. In this report, we introduce an R package called “smplot” for easy and elegant data visualization. The R package “smplot” generates graphs with defaults that are visually pleasing and informative. Although it requires basic knowledge of R and ggplot2, it significantly simplifies the process of plotting a bar graph, a violin plot, a correlation plot, a slope chart, a Bland-Altman plot and a raincloud plot. The aesthetics of the plots generated from the package are elegant, highly customisable and adhere to important practices of data visualization. The functions from smplot can be used in a modular fashion, thereby allowing the user to further customise the aesthetics. Thesmplotpackage is open source under the MIT license and available on Github (https://github.com/smin95/smplot), where updates will be posted. All the example figures in this report are reproducible and the codes and data are provided for the reader in a separate online guide (https://smin95.github.io/dataviz/).

Purpose: Several recent studies have demonstrated that following short-term monocular deprivation in normal adults, the patched eye, rather than the unpatched eye, becomes stronger in subsequent binocular viewing. However, little is known about the

How the visual system combines information from the two eyes to form a unitary binocular representation of the external world is a fundamental question in vision science that has been the focus of many psychophysical and physiological investigations. Ding & Sperling (2006) measured perceived phase of the cyclopean image, and developed a binocular combination model in which each eye exerts gain control on the other eye's signal and over the other eye's gain control. Critically, the relative phase of the monocular sine-waves plays a central role. We used the Ding-Sperling paradigm but measured both the perceived contrast and phase of cyclopean images in three hundred and eighty combinations of base contrast, interocular contrast ratio, eye origin of the probe, and interocular phase difference. We found that the perceived contrast of the cyclopean image was independent of the relative phase of the two monocular gratings, although the perceived phase depended on the relative phase and contrast ratio of the monocular images. We developed a new multi-pathway contrast-gain control model (MCM) that elaborates the Ding-Sperling binocular combination model in two ways: (1) phase and contrast of the cyclopean images are computed in separate pathways, although with shared cross-eye contrast-gain control; and (2) phase-independent local energy from the two monocular images are used in binocular contrast combination. With three free parameters, the model yielded an excellent account of data from all the experimental conditions. Binocular phase combination depends on the relative phase and contrast ratio of the monocular images but binocular contrast combination is phase-invariant. Our findings suggest the involvement of at least two separate pathways in binocular combination.