The role of eye-specific attention in ocular dominance plasticity

It is well known how selective attention biases information processing in real time, but few work investigates its aftereffects. To examine perceptual aftereffect after prolonged attention to a monocular pathway, movie images played normally were presented to normal adult’s one eye (attended eye), while movie images of the same episode but played backwards were presented to the opposite eye (unattended eye). One hour of watching this dichoptic movie caused a shift of perceptual ocular dominance towards the unattended eye. Interestingly, the aftereffect positively correlated with the advantage of neural activity for the attended-eye over unattended-eye signals at the frontal electrodes measured with steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEP). Moreover, the aftereffect disappeared when interocular competition was minimized during adaptation. These results suggest that top-down eye-specific attention can induce ocular dominance plasticity through binocular rivalry mechanisms. The ocular-opponency-neuron model for binocular rivalry is then discussed for possible mechanisms underlying the present findings.