Adaptation of Ocular Opponency Neurons Mediates Attention-Induced Ocular Dominance Plasticity

Previous research has shown that ocular dominance can be biased by prolonged attention to one eye. The ocular-opponency-neuron model of binocular rivalry has been proposed as a candidate account for this phenomenon. Yet direct neural evidence is still lacking. By manipulating the contrast of dichoptic testing gratings, here we measured the steady-state visually evoked potentials (SSVEPs) at the intermodulation frequencies to selectively track the activities of ocular-opponency-neurons before and after the “dichoptic-backward-movie” adaptation. One hour of adaptation caused a shift of perceptual and neural ocular dominance towards the unattended eye. More importantly, we found a decrease in the intermodulation SSVEP response after adaptation, which was significantly greater when high-contrast gratings were presented to the attended eye than when they were presented to the unattended eye. These results strongly support the view that the adaptation of ocular-opponency-neurons contributes to the ocular dominance plasticity induced by prolonged eye-based attention.