Concomitant strabismus and cortical eye dominance in young rhesus monkeys.

Optical dissociation of the visual images produces a loss of binocular cells at the striate cortex. Young monkeys wearing base-in prisms lose 50 per cent of their cortical binocular cells within 30 days. Exposure to visually redundant stimulation inside a striped cylinder while wearing the dissociating prisms does not prevent the loss of binocular cells. Once lost, a subsequent period of normal binocular viewing experience up to 3 months in duration does not result in significant recovery of binocular cells.