Eye and Vision Health: Dominant Eyes and the Eyes of your Children

Look into your Children’s Eyes
The importance of a regular eye exam for school-age children is underscored by the fact that 80 percent of a child’s learning is done visually. Unfortunately, however, research shows that 25 percent of children may have a learning-related vision problem.
To make matters worse, children with vision problems, even those such as hyperopia (farsightedness), accommodative (focusing), or binocular dysfunctions (how their eyes work together), may exhibit the same signs as ADD/ADHD in the classroom. As a result, many children are being misdiagnosed with ADD/ADHD when they could be more easily, and far more effectively, treated with corrective lenses.
Children with “convergence insufficiency” (a common binocular vision disorder in which the eyes tend strongly to drift outward when doing close work) are three times more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than children without the disorder. Regular eye exams are a good idea whether or not your child exhibits symptoms of vision problems.
Are you Left-eyed or Right-eyed?
Just as you have a dominant hand, you also have a dominant eye; however, the two do not always necessarily correspond to one another. Though most people show hand and eye dominance on one side or the other, at least 35 percent of the population is “crossed,” meaning that they might be right-handed but have a dominant left eye, or vice versa.
According to research involving college-aged baseball players, this can make a difference in the way that people play baseball. When the effects of ocular dominance on college baseball players were studied, it was found that the best hitters had crossed eye/hand dominance. The best pitchers had uncrossed dominance. Vision plays a crucial part in athletic performance.
In normal binocular vision, there is an “effect of parallax” in which the dominant eye is the one that is primarily relied on for precise positional information, an important role in sports that require aiming (archery, darts, etc.).
 
–William S. Mayo, DO is a double board certified ophthalmologist who has been practicing in Oxford, Mississippi since 1990 and is the owner of Mayo Eye Center.  He has also been a member of the American Osteopathic Association Board of Trustees since 2007.