Ocular dominance plasticity: A binocular combination task finds no cumulative effect with repeated patching

Abstract

Short-term monocular deprivation strengthens the contribution of the deprived eye to binocular vision. This change has been observed in adults with normal vision or amblyopia. The change in ocular dominance is transient and recovers over approximately one hour. This shift has been measured with various visual tasks, including binocular rivalry and binocular combination. We investigated whether the ocular dominance shift could be accumulated across multiple periods of monocular deprivation over consecutive days. We used a binocular phase combination task to measure the shift in eye dominance. We patched the dominant eye of ten adults with normal vision for two hours across five consecutive days. Our results show no cumulative effect after repeated sessions of short-term monocular deprivation.