I’ve blogged before on how we live in four dimensions, not two or three dimensions.  That is, we live through time.  And our vision has to work through time.  

Generally speaking, vision testing is in two or occasionally in three dimensions.  So, when you read letters on a chart, that’s a two-dimensional task:  length and width.  In math, that’s the X and Y axes.

When we have you look at pictures in-depth, or when you look at some of the “Magic Eye” pictures and see artificial depth, that’s three dimensions.  We’ve added the Z axis, in math terms.  So, the pictures look closer to you – they pop out toward you.

But, the impediment we treat the most, is in the fourth dimension:  time.  As I said, our vision has to work through time.  That’s not like you are seeing the same today as you were last year.  No, the question is, are your eyes working simultaneously as we watch how they work through several minutes as you look at a succession of bilateral visual targets?

We did a study of the timing of intermittent suppression in 2002.  We did videos of people showing us the timing of their suppressions then timed the suppression sequences with a stopwatch.  As part of that, we also looked at what people’s primary complaints about their eyes were.  Those primary complaints are in the chart below.  So, those are worth paying attention to in how your child is doing with school work.

The full paper is here.  

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