No abstract

It is well known how selective attention biases information processing in real time, but few work investigates the aftereffects of prolonged attention, let alone the underlying neural mechanisms. 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. 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 present study opens the route to explain at least part of short-term ocular dominance plasticity with the ocular-opponency-neuron model, which may be an interesting complement to the homeostatic compensation theory.

Previous research has implied that monetary reward to target location (a reward for spatial properties) can affect object‐based attention, but no study has directly investigated the influence of monetary objects (a reward for object properties) on object‐based attention. Thus, it is unclear whether and how monetary objects can affect object‐based attention. To experimentally investigate this problem, this study adapted the well‐established two‐rectangle paradigm. In Experiment 1, either two 100‐yuan notes or two 1‐yuan notes were presented to participants. We found an object‐based effect with faster responses to targets at an uncued position on the cued object compared to those at an equidistant position on the uncued object; the effect was similar in 100‐yuan and 1‐yuan note trials. In Experiment 2, two notes (one 100‐yuan and one 1‐yuan) were simultaneously presented to participants, and cue location (100‐yuan, 1‐yuan) was manipulated. We found a greater object‐based effect when the cue appeared on the 100‐yuan note than on the 1‐yuan note. These results suggest that the rewarding property of objects can affect object‐based attention by means of altering object salience.