Stereopsis recovery, also recovery from stereoblindness, is the phenomenon of a stereoblind person gaining partial or full ability of stereo vision (stereopsis).
This has long been established as a therapeutic treatment of stereoblind patients. This aims to recover stereo vision in very young children, as well as in patients who had acquired but lost their ability for stereopsis due to a medical condition. In contrast, this aim has normally not been present in the treatment of those who missed out on learning stereopsis during their first few years of life. In fact, the acquisition of binocular and stereo vision was long thought to be impossible unless the person acquired this skill during a critical period in infancy and early childhood. This hypothesis normally went unquestioned and has formed the basis for the therapeutic approaches to binocular disorders for decades. It has been put in doubt in recent years. In particular since studies on stereopsis recovery began to appear in scientific journals and it became publicly known that neuroscientist Susan R. Barry achieved stereopsis well into adulthood, that assumption is in retrospect considered to have held the status of a scientific dogma.
Very recently, there has been a rise in scientific investigations into stereopsis recovery in adults and youths who have had no stereo vision before. While it has now been shown that an adult may gain stereopsis, it is currently not yet possible to predict how likely a stereoblind person is to do so, nor is there general agreement on the best therapeutic procedure. Also the possible implications for the treatment of children with infantile esotropia are still under study.
In cases of acquired strabismus with double vision (diplopia), it is long-established state of the art to aim at curing the double vision and at the same time recovering a patient's earlier ability for stereo vision. For example, a patient may have had full stereo vision but later had diplopia due to a medical condition, losing stereo vision. In this case, medical interventions, including vision therapy and strabismus surgery, may remove the double vision and recover the stereo vision which had temporarily been absent in the patient.