Dolores Bradley and Alcides Fernandes, co-investigators of the studies. Dr. Bradley, a vision research scientist and Dr. Fernandes, a pediatric ophthalmologist, use monkeys as models for conditions affecting the visual system in children. Their findings suggest that infants should have their eyes checked in the first year of life so that a problem in one eye can be detected early and prevent disrupting the growth of the fellow eye. Parents often wait until their children reach school age to have their eyes checked, but by then subtle problems in one eye may have already damaged the healthy eye as well. Such problems inhibit depth perception, the ability to see fine detail, and general visual acuity, limiting an individual's activities.
Refraction refers to the deflection of a ray of light as it enters the eye.
As it goes in the light is bent or refracted . With normal vision, the image of a distant target comes into focus on the surface of the retina, located at the back of the eye. No matter where the monkeys started at birth, by the time they were 1.5 years of age, their eye growth was all tightly clustered at one specific stage of growth. The monkeys whose eyes were closer to that stage at birth didn't change much, while those further from it grew at a faster rate. After examining the normal group, the team compared it with 15 neonatal monkeys that were reared in three different treatment groups until adolescence .