Short-Term Deprivation Does Not Influence Monocular or Dichoptic Temporal Synchrony at Low Temporal Frequency

Abstract

Studies on binocular combination and rivalry show that short-term deprivation strengthens the contribution of the deprived eye in binocular vision. However, whether short-term monocular deprivation affects temporal processing per se is not clear. To address this issue, we conducted a study to investigate the effect of monocular deprivation on dichoptic temporal synchrony. We tested ten adults with normal vision and patched their dominant eye with an opaque patch for 2.5 h. A temporal synchrony paradigm was used to measure if temporal synchrony thresholds change as a result of monocular pattern deprivation. In this paradigm, we displayed two pairs of Gaussian blobs flickering at 1 Hz with either the same or different phased- temporal modulation. In Experiment 1, we obtained the thresholds for detecting temporal asynchrony under dichoptic viewing configurations. We compared the thresholds for temporal synchrony between before and after monocular deprivation and found no significant changes of the interocular synchrony. In Experiment 2, we measured the monocular thresholds for detecting temporal asynchrony. We also found no significant changes of the monocular synchrony of either the patched eye or the unpatched eye. Our findings suggest that short-term monocular deprivation induced-plasticity does not influence monocular or dichoptic temporal synchrony at low temporal frequency.