I’m curious about what exactly a dominant eye means, and what effect it has on how humans see the world
In: 4
With both eyes open, stick either arm out and point to something at a distance. You will see two fingers coming out of your hand. Close each eye separately and the one that points accurately is your dominant eye.
I can only guess having a dominant eye would improve the accuracy of throwing with a dominant arm. But I’ve read people can have mixed dominance between limbs and vision. Or between upper and lower body.
It’s akin to having a dominant hand. In many situations, it doesn’t matter, but it can matter when some things are designed a certain way or you need to see from a particular position.
Some effects come in when there’s “cross dominance,” for example being right-handed, but having a left-dominant eye, as I happen to be. When I shoot a pistol, I have to position my head differently to see the sights better than a right/right person would.
I think the dominant eye is the best for seeing pictures and sight in detail and the non-dominant eye just gets used by your brain to provide depth perception.
It’s like being right handed. It means you look at thing solely with that eye and the other eye acts as peripheral vision..
One application is the single-eye viewing devices, like cameras. Most people would choose to use their dominant eye if they have to use only one eye, and the non-dominant eye may perform poorly if used alone.
In the movie Firebird, Jake Preston (Nicolas Cage) has a left dominant eye but the helicopter’s helmet mounted the night-vision eye-piece right side, so he has to train his right eye to be the dominant eye.
I myself also have left dominant eye so when I use cameras, I see with only the left eye through the viewfinder and my right eye is blocked with the camera body. People with right dominant eye could use the right eye to see through the viewfinder and keep the left eye open to see outside the camera. I can never do that because if my two eyes sees different views, then the left dominates and the right eye’s view couldn’t draw enough attention from the brain.
Same for shooting a gun. The ideal case is to use the dominant eye for aiming and the non-dominant eye to keep aware of the entire scene. If you aim with the non-dominant eye, most people would subconsciously close the dominant eye and lose most of the situational awareness.
It means our brain doesn’t focus on both optical signals equally, one is the primary input. Your perception is aligned on one eye only.
Try this: look at an object on a wall (a light switch or clock, something relatively small, not a large window) and point at it. Extend your arm out straight in front of you, with your finger pointing at the object. Now close one eye, then open it again and close the other.
If you’ve done it right, you’ll see that the finger lines up with the object in one eye, but not in the other. This is a result of how your brain uses the information, nothing more.
It’s not important for most things, but does come into play when aiming things (like firearms).
Latest Answers