Attention enhances short-term monocular deprivation effect

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 toward 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 presumably deployed to the opposite eye. Therefore, the short-term monocular deprivation effect might be, in part, mediated by eye-specific attentional modulation. Yet this question remains largely unanswered. To address this issue, here we asked participants to perform an attentive tracking task with one eye patched. During the tracking, participants were presented with both target gratings (attended stimuli) and distractor gratings (unattended stimuli) that were distinct from each other in fundamental visual features. Before and after one hour of tracking, they completed a binocular rivalry task to measure perceptual ocular dominance. A larger shift of ocular dominance toward the deprived eye was observed 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. This result, for the first time, suggests that attention can boost the strength of the short-term monocular deprivation effect. Therefore, the present study sheds new light on the role of attention in ocular dominance plasticity.