Assistant professor of visual neuroscience Regan Ashby and his team will place a translucent diffuser - a white round patch about the size of a ten cent piece - over their eyes. The patch allows light and dark to reach the eye, but no sharp imagery. So the chick thinks its vision has gone abnormal, switches to a default state and grows the eye, the same as a myopic eye develops.

The experiment mimics what happens to humans suffering myopia, or short-sightedness, and will add to research which indicates more light in a child's development protects them from myopia.

In three days researchers will see a dramatic difference in the chicks eyes, and after a week they will remove the patches and change the environment around the chicks, to see how they respond to light.

Dr Ashby says chickens have been used in experiments like this since the 1970s when they were the first animals to show eye growth was visually-driven.

After completing his PhD in myopia research at the ANU, Dr Ashby continued studying in Germany when researchers began making a link between prevention of myopia and children exposed to more light outdoors. He began looking at a chemical messenger called dopamine

"Now dopamine is the main neurotransmitter in the eye that moves you between light and dark, so when we go into daytime colour vision, dopamine levels burst and that's what puts us into day time vision," he said. "When we go into night time vision which is black and white or grainy grey, dopamine levels go down, so that's the switch."

Dr Ashby said even crude experiments with shining strong, outdoor lights on chickens, unexpectedly showed high levels of protection. His studies also looked at blocking dopamine from doing its job in the eye, and finding light had no effect.

"Now that we have shown light levels seem to play a characteristic role, human studies have already started in Taiwan and China, where large populations of kids have been put outdoors for longer during school days, so far they have a positive effect, they are slowing the onset of myopia," Dr Ashby said.

In Singapore and China, where myopia rates are about 90 per cent among young people, city-living, longer days spent inside at school and pollution are all possible causes for reducing light exposure to young people.

"It's astounding, I cannot think of another disease which has prevalence rates this high anywhere," Dr Ashby said. He is confident Australia's outdoor, sporting culture and bright sunlight is sufficient enough to keep myopia rates down.