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Accommodation and vergence latencies in human infants.

Tondel GM, Candy TR

Indiana University School of Optometry, 800 E. Atwater Avenue, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA.

PURPOSE: Achieving simultaneous single and clear visual experience during postnatal development depends on the temporal relationship between accommodation and vergence, in addition to their accuracies. This study was designed to examine one component of the dynamic relationship, the latencies of the responses. METHODS: Infants and adults were tested in three conditions (i) binocular viewing of a target moving in depth at 5cm/s (closed loop) (ii) monocular viewing of the same target (vergence open loop) (iii) binocular viewing of a low spatial frequency Difference of Gaussian target during a prism induced step change in retinal disparity (accommodation open loop). RESULTS: There was a significant correlation between accommodation and vergence latencies in binocular conditions for infants from 7 to 23 weeks of age. Some of the infants, as young as 7 or 8 weeks, generated adult-like latencies of less than 0.5s. Latencies in the vergence open loop and accommodation open loop conditions tended to be shorter for the stimulated system than the open loop system in both cases, and all latencies were typically less than 2s across the infant age range. CONCLUSIONS: Many infants between 7 and 23 weeks of age were able to generate accommodation and vergence responses with latencies of less than a second in full binocular closed loop conditions. The correlation between the latencies in the two systems suggests that they are limited by related factors from the earliest ages tested.

Published 11 February 2008 in Vision Res, 48(4): 564-76.
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