McGill Vision Research, Department of Ophthalmology, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Sci Rep. 2018 Apr 18;8(1):6191. doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-24584-9.
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.
短期剥夺一只眼睛的输入会增加其对视觉感知的影响强度。这种效应最初是使用双眼竞争任务来证明的。向两只眼睛呈现不兼容的刺激，然后测量它们对感知优势的竞争。进一步的研究使用了一种组合任务，该任务测量了每只眼睛对融合感知的贡献。这两个任务都显示了剥夺的效果，但它们之间存在不一致。这表明剥夺会引起多种效果。我们使用双眼掩蔽来探索这种可能性。我们测量了向目标眼呈现光栅刺激时的检测对比度阈值。当向另一只眼呈现平行或交叉定向的光栅掩蔽时，阈值会升高。这种掩蔽效应在剥夺目标眼 150 分钟后会降低。我们测试了 14 名视力正常的受试者，发现这种降低的幅度存在个体差异。比较每个受试者在两个掩蔽之间（平行与交叉定向）发现的降低程度，我们没有发现相关性。这表明短期单眼剥夺没有单一的潜在影响。相反，有单独的效果，它们可能有不同的依赖性，并可以通过不同的任务来探测。
