Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2023-10-13
Abstract： Patching one eye of an adult human for a few hours has been found to promote the dominance of the patched eye, which is called short-term monocular deprivation effect. Interestingly, recent work has reported that prolonged eye-specific attention can also cause a shift of ocular dominance towards the unattended eye though visual inputs during adaptation are balanced across the eyes. Considering that patching blocks all input information from one eye, attention is undoubtedly deployed to the opposite eye. Therefore, the short-term monocular deprivation effect might to some extent be contributed by the eye-specific attentional modulation, which remains largely unknown. The goal of the present study was to investigate whether attention can modulate the short-term monocular deprivation effect in adults.
Twenty adult participants took part in the present study. We asked participants to perform an attentive tracking task throughout the monocular patching. During the tracking, the primary stimuli consisted of two types of chromatic gratings, red-green gratings (R-G) and yellow-blue (Y-B) gratings, one of which was defined as the target gratings (attended stimuli) and the other as the distractor gratings (unattended stimuli). Target gratings and distractor gratings were distinct from each other in fundamental visual features such as color, shape, and spatial frequency. We instructed participants to continuously attend to and track the movement of the target grating in the attentive tracking task. Before and after one hour of monocular patching, we measured participants’ ocular dominance using a binocular rivalry task in which both target gratings and distractor gratings served as testing stimuli.
In case there lacks of comparability in binocular rivalry performance measured with different types of testing stimuli, we focused on the comparison of the monocular deprivation effect for the same testing stimuli between different attention conditions. Our results generally support the notion of attentional modulation on the monocular deprivation effect. To be specific, we observed a larger shift of ocular dominance towards the deprived eye when the binocular rivalry testing gratings shared features with the target gratings during the tracking compared to when they shared features with the distractor gratings. For testing with Y-B gratings, there was a significantly greater monocular deprivation effect when Y-B gratings were attended during the patching compared to when R-G gratings were attended. For testing with R-G gratings, we detected a similar trend, though it did not reach statistical significance.
In conclusion, the present study provides some preliminary evidence supporting the modulatory role of attention in the effect of typical monocular deprivation. Our work suggests that short-term ocular dominance plasticity is not solely determined by imbalanced visual feedforward inputs, but also affected by top-down attentional feedbacks, discovering potential interplays between higher-level cognitive functions and lower-level visual processing in this phenomenon. Because monocular deprivation has recently been used to treat amblyopia, our finding of attentional modulation on this effect may provide useful clues on how to optimize such treatment in future work.
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Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2023-05-15
Abstract： During the development, the structure and functions of the visual system can be affected by visual experiences and environments. This is called visual plasticity which is most prominent during the critical period of development after birth. Although the structures and functions of neural circuits tend to be stable in adult visual cortex, mounting evidence has shown that adult visual cortex still retains a certain degree of plasticity, including ocular dominance plasticity. In recent decades, it has been found that perceptual ocular dominance in adults can be biased by adjusting the input information or attentional allocation between the two eyes. However, the neural mechanisms underlying these different types of ocular dominance plasticity may have multiple origins. Monocular deprivation due to imbalanced visual inputs may be accounted for by the homeostatic plasticity mechanism of the visual cortex. However, the shift of ocular dominance caused by imbalanced attentional allocations between the two eyes reflects the feedbacks from higher cortical sites, which is currently explained by the adaptation of ocular opponency neurons. Future studies may provide more direct evidence for the ocular-opponency-neuron account and explore the likely interactions between attention and visual input that reshape ocular dominance.
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