Monocular deprivation boosts long-term visual plasticity

Abstract

Summary Monocular deprivation (MD) has been widely used to measure plasticity in the early visual system [1]. It is widely known that during an early critical period of an observer's life, the ocular dominance in the primary visual cortex is severely disrupted when measured immediately after the offset of MD. In contrast, hardly any change was observed when MD is conducted after the critical period [2]. Here we report that long-term plasticity occurred significantly more rapidly with the non-deprived eye than with the deprived eye of human adults when induced by training on a visual task conducted after three-day MD. Thus, the present results challenge the long-standing view that MD has no long-term influence on the visual function of normal adults.