Although exercise effects have been found in the visual cortex of rodents (Sale et al.,
2007), their extrapolation to primates is not conclusive. In humans, evidence for an exercise effect on plasticity has previously been limited to prefrontal and hippocampal regions (Erickson, Gildengers, & Butters,
2013). This was the case until the recent study by Lunghi and Sale (
2015). They argued that exercise could modulate the plasticity of the early visual cortex of adults. For their measure of plasticity, Lunghi and Sale used the shift of ocular dominance caused by short-term monocular deprivation. If one eye is deprived of visual input for a period of around 2 hr, there is a shift in dominance in favor of the patched eye. This effect has been demonstrated with deprivation from eye patches (Lunghi, Burr, & Morrone,
2011), dichoptically presented movies (Zhou, Reynaud, & Hess,
2014), processed video input from “altered reality” systems (Bai, Dong, He, & Bao,
2017), and continuous flash suppression (Kim, Kim, & Blake,
2017). The shift in ocular dominance has been confirmed with EEG (Zhou, Baker, Simard, Saint-Armour, & Hess,
2015), fMRI (Binda et al.,
2018), MEG (Chadnova, Reynaud, Clavagnier, & Hess,
2017), and various psychophysical tasks (Baldwin & Hess,
2018; Spiegel, Baldwin, & Hess,
2017; Zhou, Clavagnier, & Hess,
2013). For their study on the effect of exercise, Lunghi and Sale measured the ocular dominance shift with a binocular rivalry paradigm. The perceptual dominance of each eye was monitored before and after deprivation. They found that exercise during the deprivation period enhanced the shift in ocular dominance. However, a later study by Zhou et al. (
2017) failed to find an effect of exercise. Their methods were similar to Lunghi and Sale although, rather than binocular rivalry, they used a task that measured the relative strength of the input from each eye to a fused binocular percept.