Perceptual ocular dominance plasticity is resilient to concurrent attentional demands in working memory

Short-term monocular deprivation (MD) in adult humans induces a notable shift in perceptual ocular dominance towards the deprived eye. This form of visual plasticity has been proposed to share common mechanisms with other types of plasticity, such as those supporting working memory, based on a recent finding that the MD effect is impaired when a visual working memory task is performed concurrently. However, in that study, the visual content of the tasks and their attentional demands were not strictly controlled. To revisit the modulatory role of working memory in perceptual ocular dominance plasticity, we measured the MD effect with binocular rivalry in participants who underwent one hour of MD while performing either an object-switching working memory task or a figure identification task matched for visual input to the former. The results showed that, although the working memory task was substantially more demanding than the figure identification task, the two tasks produced significant and comparable short-term MD effects. Our finding thus challenges the previous notion that working memory interferes with adult visual plasticity induced by monocular deprivation.