Abstract
Short-term deprivation of the input to one eye increases the strength of its influence on visual perception. This effect was first demonstrated using a binocular rivalry task. Incompatible stimuli are shown to the two eyes, and their competition for perceptual dominance is then measured. Further studies used a combination task, which measures the contribution of each eye to a fused percept. Both tasks show an effect of deprivation, but there have been inconsistencies between them. This suggests that the deprivation causes multiple effects. We used dichoptic masking to explore this possibility. We measured the contrast threshold for detecting a grating stimulus presented to the target eye. Thresholds were elevated when a parallel or cross-oriented grating mask was presented to the other eye. This masking effect was reduced by depriving the target eye for 150 minutes. We tested fourteen subjects with normal vision, and found individual differences in the magnitude of this reduction. Comparing the reduction found in each subject between the two masks (parallel vs. cross-oriented), we found no correlation. This indicates that there is not a single underlying effect of short-term monocular deprivation. Instead there are separate effects which can have different dependencies, and be probed by different tasks.
Highlights
Recent studies have found that short-term monocular deprivation can shift ocular dominance to favour the deprived eye[1,2,3,4,5,6]
An effect of exercise on the magnitude of the patching effect was found with binocular rivalry[12] but not with the phase combination task[13]
A later study showed that this is true for the phase combination task, but that there is an effect with a binocular rivalry task[9]
Summary
Recent studies have found that short-term monocular deprivation can shift ocular dominance to favour the deprived eye[1,2,3,4,5,6]. The dichoptic movie studies replaced the patching with a pair of video clips shown to the two eyes These videos were processed independently to show different information to each eye. The original study by Lunghi et al.[1] used a binocular rivalry task In this task, incompatible stimuli are shown to the two eyes. Other studies have used a phase combination task This measures the contribution of each eye to a fused binocular percept[2,11]. It was originally reported that scrambling the phase of a dichoptic movie in one eye does not elicit the patching effect[8]. The rivalry and phase combination tasks have been the most frequent, other measures have been used to study the effect of patching[2,6,14]. Previous studies have explored the relationship between dichoptic masking and both binocular rivalry[16,17] and binocular combination[18]
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