Abstract: PURPOSE: We investigated whether short-term ocular dominance plasticity induced by monocular deprivation follows a similar dynamic to that in visual adaptation, specifically perceptual deterioration.
METHODS: We patched the non-dominant eye of fifteen adults with normal or corrected-to-normal vision for two hours over seven consecutive days. A baseline measurement of the balance point (BP) before the monocular deprivation and post-deprivation measurement of the BP were performed on the first, third, fifth, and seventh days. During the baseline measurement session, each subject's BP was tested twice. After the deprivation, BP was tested six times to see the eye dominance shift at 0-min, 3-min, 6-min, 12-min, 24-min, and 48-min. We measured the shift in eye dominance using a binocular orientation combination task. By using a logistic function, we fitted a psychometric function and then estimated the BP.
RESULTS: To quantify the patching effect over time, we used the area under the curve (AUC). We performed a one-sample t-test to prove that the AUC had a significant difference relative to baseline on all test days, and then conducted a one-way repeated measures ANOVA to report that there was no significant difference in the measurement of AUC across different days.
CONCLUSIONS: Our results showed no perceptual deterioration phenomenon after repeated periods of short-term monocular deprivation, suggesting that plasticity induction after the deprivation does not share a common mechanism with contrast adaptation. In other words, this study shows that monocular deprivation is a promising protocol for treating visual disorders such as amblyopia because its beneficial effect on vision would not deteriorate after repeated induction.

Key words: ocular dominance plasticity, short-term monocular deprivation, clinical application