Brief localised monocular deprivation in adults alters binocular rivalry predominance retinotopically and reduces spatial inhibition

Abstract

Short-term deprivation (2.5 h) of an eye has been shown to boost its relative ocular dominance in young adults. Here, we show that a much shorter deprivation period (3–6 min) produces a similar paradoxical boost that is retinotopic and reduces spatial inhibition on neighbouring, non-deprived areas. Partial deprivation was conducted in the left hemifield, central vision or in an annular region, later assessed with a binocular rivalry tracking procedure. Post-deprivation, dominance of the deprived eye increased when rivalling images were within the deprived retinotopic region, but not within neighbouring, non-deprived areas where dominance was dependent on the correspondence between the orientation content of the stimuli presented in the deprived and that of the stimuli presented in non-deprived areas. Together, these results accord with other deprivation studies showing V1 activity changes and reduced GABAergic inhibition.

Reduced surround suppression in monocular motion perception

“…In those studies, they usually occlude one eye using a patch for 2.5 hr, and in our Experiment 2, we occluded the eye for 2 min (that was the time needed to obtain two thresholds in each session). However, in a recent study using shorter deprivation periods of 3 to 6 min, Han et al (2020) found that the deprived eye changed from spatial surround suppression before deprivation to surround facilitation afterward; no binocular conditions were tested. This raises the question of whether the lower suppression index we found in the monocular condition might reflect a similar process, with the monocular results being affected by a shift toward facilitation.…”

“…Second, in Experiment 2, we allowed a recovery period of 3 min in between monocular sessions. Han et al (2020) found their effect immediately after deprivation, while Kim et al (2017) found that the effect of a 15-min deprivation had largely decayed back to baseline after 5 min of recovery. Nevertheless, we examined our data to see if we could detect any effect attributable to previous deprivation rather than monocular viewing per se.…”

Binocular rivalry under naturalistic geometry: Evidence from worlds simulated in virtual reality

“…Over the years, BR has emerged as a popular tool for studying perceptual bistability ( 6 ), predictive coding ( 7 ), neural concomitants of consciousness ( 8 ), and visual processing outside of awareness ( 9 ). BR has also been employed as a psychophysical tool for studying other aspects of human perception and cognition, including visual adaptation ( 10 ), eye dominance ( 11–13 ), mental imagery ( 14 ), spatial vision ( 15–17 ), multimodal sensory interactions ( 18–20 ), serial dependence ( 21 ), perceptual decision-making ( 22 ), and the effects of attention on visual plasticity ( 23 , 24 ). BR has also been used as a proxy for assessing GABAergic inhibition in the human brain ( 25–29 ) and as an assay for examining neural dynamics in people diagnosed with psychiatric disorders ( 30 ).…”

Measuring the reliability of binocular rivalry

“…The dynamics of binocular rivalry provide an elaborated measure of ocular dominance, more quantitative and precise ( Ooi & He, 2020 ) than other sighting eye dominance tests, such as the Porta test ( Porta, 1593 ; Lederer, 1961 ) or the hole in card test ( Durand & Gould, 1910 ). For example, binocular rivalry made it possible to unveil a form of plasticity in adult humans, consisting of an ocular dominance shift after a brief period (approximately 2 hours) of monocular deprivation ( Lunghi, Burr, & Morrone, 2011 , 2013 ; Han, Alais, MacDougall, & Verstraten, 2020 ; Wang, McGraw, & Ledgeway, 2020 ).…”