Ocular Dominance - Importance of Ocular Dominance

Importance of Ocular Dominance

Since 'worse eye dominance' goes against nature and common sense (i.e., in 'handedness', the stronger/faster/better hand is dominant, enabling quicker and more accurate actions, reactions, and decision-making) it is curious that in myopic patients the more seriously afflicted eye is dominant. The myopes in question may undergo a reversal of their normal better eye dominance as a result of continuously wearing their prescribed lenses, and thus ocular dominance bears on whether opticians should prescribe lenses which bring both eyes to equal eyesight (rather than leaving the worse eye slightly undercorrected). Depending on how ocular dominance interacts with contact lenses current practices may be inducing abnormal reversal and contributing to continued worsening eyesight.

In normal binocular vision there is an effect of parallax, and therefore the dominant eye is the one that is primarily relied on for precise positional information. This may be especially important in sports which require aim, such as archery, darts or shooting sports.

It has been asserted that cross-dominance (in which the dominant eye is on one side and the dominant hand is on the other) is advantageous in sports requiring side-on stances (e.g. baseball, cricket, golf); however, recent studies have shown this not to be the case. In a study of professional baseball players, hand-ocular dominance patterns did not show an effect on batting average or ERA. Similarly, in 2005, a South African study found that "cricketers were not more likely to have crossed dominance" than the normal population.

Ocular dominance is an important consideration in predicting patient satisfaction with monovision correction in cataract surgery, refractive surgery, and contact lens wear.