Interocular transfer of visual memory – Influence of visual impairment and abnormalities of the optic chiasm

Abstract

Due to an increased crossing of the optic nerve fibers at the optic chiasm in albinism, the visual cortex receives largely monocular input from the contralateral eye. Here we investigated whether this obstruction of binocular integration at the cortical input stage also impacts on interocular information exchange at the high processing level of visual memory. Interocular transfer (IOT) of visual memory retrieval was tested psychophysically after monocular encoding in 8 albinotic participants and 24 healthy controls. The retrieval performance (hit rate, reaction time, d’) was determined when using the same or different eye at encoding. To assess the effect of reduced visual acuity (VA) on recognition, we simulated interocular acuity differences (IOA) in two healthy control groups (each n = 8), i.e., with large (VA: 0.89 vs. 0.12) and small simulated interocular difference (VA: 0.25 vs. 0.12), with the latter matched to that observed in the albinotic participants (VA: 0.20 vs. 0.15). A significant decrease in retrieval performance was observed in controls with simulated strongly reduced VA in one eye (p < 0.0001). For the other conditions and groups, including the albinotic participants, no dependence on VA and no significant difference between using the same or different eye was observed. This indicates interocular transfer and hence interocular information exchange in human albinism. These findings thus provide insights into the scope of plasticity of binocular information processing and inter-hemispherical information flow.