Perceptual learning to reduce sensory eye dominance beyond the focus of top-down visual attention

Perceptual learning is an important means for the brain to maintain its agility in a dynamic environment. Top-down focal attention, which selects task-relevant stimuli against competing ones in the background, is known to control and select what is learned in adults. Still unknown, is whether the adult brain is able to learn highly visible information beyond the focus of top-down attention. If it is, we should be able to reveal a purely stimulus-driven perceptual learning occurring in functions that are largely determined by the early cortical level, where top-down attention modulation is weak. Such an automatic, stimulus-driven learning mechanism is commonly assumed to operate only in the juvenile brain. We performed perceptual training to reduce sensory eye dominance (SED), a function that taps on the eye-of-origin information represented in the early visual cortex. Two retinal locations were simultaneously stimulated with suprathreshold, dichoptic orthogonal gratings. At each location, monocular cueing triggered perception of the grating images of the weak eye and suppression of the strong eye. Observers attended only to one location and performed orientation discrimination of the gratings seen by the weak eye, while ignoring the highly visible gratings at the second, unattended, location. We found SED was not only reduced at the attended location, but also at the unattended location. Furthermore, other untrained visual functions mediated by higher cortical levels improved. An automatic, stimulus-driven learning mechanism causes synaptic alterations in the early cortical level, with a far-reaching impact on the later cortical levels.