Abstract
People with large sensory eye dominance (SED) tend to perform worse in tasks requiring binocular vision because of their unbalanced interocular inhibition. The current study aimed to reduce SED by combining two perceptual learning techniques—the mean orientation discrimination (MOD) task (Mansouri et al., 2004) and a push-pull perceptual learning protocol (Xu et al., 2010). In the MOD task, half of 16 oriented Gabors were presented within a donut frame to each eye simultaneously and participants judged their mean orientation. The contrast of Gabors shown to the weak eye was increased according to participant's latest SED measurements, and task difficulty was increased when performance reached over 90% accuracy. In the push-pull protocol, a brief clockwise movement of the frame shown to the weak eye induced participant's attention. Ten participants were assigned to each of three groups: basic training, combined training, and control. The basic training used the MOD task, and the combined training used the MOD task together with the push-pull protocol. There were 16 sessions including 4 SED measurements and 12 trainings. SED was measured before and after every 4th training session. For the control group, we measured participants' SED four times without any training and the interval between each measurement was closely matched to the two groups. We found that the SED was significantly reduced in the two training groups, but not in the control group, indicative of positive training effects. However, the training effects did not differ between the two training groups. In addition, as the first measured SED was larger, the training effects became larger, which was mediated by the increased difficulty of the MOD task during the training. Overall, our results suggest that SED can be reduced by both the MOD task and the push-pull protocol.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2017