Dataset for "Natural-scene-based Steady-state Visual Evoked Potentials Reveal Effects of Short-term Monocular Deprivation"

This datasets comprises of the data presented in the publication "Natural-scene-based Steady-state Visual Evoked Potentials Reveal Effects of Short-term Monocular Deprivation" (Lyu et al., 2020) and the codes for data analyses.Ocular dominance plasticity beyond the critical period has been demonstrated in adult humans in recent investigations of short-term monocular deprivation (MD). To our knowledge, all previous research adopted non-natural synthetic stimuli in testing perceptual ocular dominance before and after the MD. However, it is recognized that complex natural stimuli may engage cortical mechanisms substantially different from simple synthetic stimuli. Therefore, it remains largely unknown whether reshaping of ocular dominance following MD could be observed during perception of natural scene stimuli without conspicuous interocular competition. Here we used the steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) technique to measure the ocular-specific neural effects of MD with natural scene stimuli where the two eyes’ images were tagged with different frequencies. Two hours of MD boosted the neural gain for the deprived eye. During the course of MD, the SSVEP amplitude ratio for the deprived eye compared to the non-deprived eye increased significantly over time, indicating a progressive increase of neural gain for the deprived eye. These findings demonstrate that the effects of short-term MD can manifest when viewing natural scenes, providing a natural case in support of the homeostatic compensation theory of MD. Our work also indicates that the technique of natural-scene-based SSVEP could be particularly useful for future work exploring the neural dynamics during adaptation to natural stimuli.For details of the dataset, please see readme.txt in the root directory after unzipping. For details of the study, please refer to:Lyu, L., He, S., Jiang, Y., Engel, S. A., & Bao, M. (2020). Natural-scene-based steady-state visual evoked potentials reveal effects of short-term monocular deprivation. Neuroscience, 435, 10-21. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroscience.2020.03.039.