Dominant eye issues

[P3D <PTWW@xxxxxxx>]

Well it was quite a coincidence for me that George brought up the
dominant eye issue...it plays an important role in the "learning to
freeview" message that I recently threatened to post to the list.
(I will get to it eventually, Larry!)

Like Gabriel, I had a hazy recollection of a procedure for checking
which eye is dominant.  Peter Davis chimed in with the details, but
to someone who hasn't been made aware of it, "see which causes the
scene to change from the two eyed view" may need some clarification.
With a little experimenting, I came up with the following more
specific advice:  use your index finger to point at an object some
distance away, such as on the other side of a moderate-sized
room.  When you close your dominant eye, it will appear that you
are no longer pointing at the object.  Obviously, you should not
select an enormous object, such as "the wall," at which to point.
Try to be fairly specific.

I have long been curious, however, whether the following simple test
is also valid:  Which eye do you use to look through your camera's
viewfinder?  Many people are not even aware of which eye they use.
My hypothesis is that we somehow instinctively use the dominant eye.
No need to clutter up the list, but if anyone wants to contribute
to a non-random survey, I'll compile the results.  Report dominant
hand, dominant eye, and viewfinder eye. mailto:ptww@xxxxxxx.

When I first heard a "how to check for dominant eye" tip many years
ago, the story said that right-handed people are usually right-eye
dominant, and left handers are left-eye dominant.  I know this is
not universally the case, however, because I am right-handed but
left-eyed (and was excited to learn on reading Mike's post that I
am not alone in the world!)  This discrepancy became especially
obvious a long time ago at an arcade "shoot-em-up" game, when I
finally realized the reason I couldn't come hit anything was that
I was trying to sight with my left eye while shooting the mini-rifle
right-handed.  I had to force myself to use the far less natural
(to me) right eye view to be able to use the sights.

So do we have any ambidexterous list members?  Do they find they
have a dominant eye?  Is it possible to *not* have a dominant eye?
My prediction would be no: one perspective or the other must be
dominant.

Are there variations in degree of eye-dominance?  Maybe some people
will be unable to even momentarily switch to the non-dominant eye
view with both eyes open, but what could it possibly mean to say
that George's wife has greater (or less) eye-dominance than George?
I have no idea.

Larry Berlin added:

>once you
>become aware of this controllable element, you can learn to shift your
>mental awareness from one eye to the other while both eyes are open. Eye
>dominance can be overcome somewhat with training of awareness.

I had never heard of shifting eye-dominance until Larry brought it up,
but he is right.  I was able to do this easily while doing the pointing
exercise described above.  I think, however, that being able to overcome
eye dominance is limited to the period of time you actively override
your natural tendency.  Once you stop forcing the opposite view, you
will revert to the dominant eye view.

Paul Talbot


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