Abstract
REARING animals in a visually restricted environment can lead to marked abnormalities of both the response properties of single visual neurones1–4 and the visual capacities of the organism5,6. These findings have important implications for understanding the development of human vision and have led to many studies of visually deprived humans7–9. Although there are similarities between the effects of deprivation in animals and humans there are still major difficulties in extrapolating from experimental deprivation to clinically observed amblyopia. There is, therefore, a need for quantitative psychophysical studies of visually deprived animals using the same tests as those used with human patients. We have quantified the pattern vision of visually deprived cats by measuring their spatial contrast sensitivity, an approach which has frequently been used to characterise the vision of human amblyopes7–9. We report here that the spatial resolution of cats reared in stroboscopic illumination is seriously impaired and that changes in their contrast sensitivity are similar to those seen in certain types of amblyopia.
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PASTERNAK, T., MERIGAN, W. Abnormal visual resolution of cats reared in stroboscopic illumination. Nature 280, 313–314 (1979). https://doi.org/10.1038/280313a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/280313a0
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