2026-10-13T14:51:05Z https://www.scidb.cn/oai

10.57760/sciencedb.43607 2026-08-26T13:40:39Z

2026-08-26 Attention gates reward modulation of short-term ocular dominance plasticity doi:10.57760/sciencedb.43607 en Reward is widely known to facilitate learning and neural plasticity, yet whether it modulates short-term perceptual ocular dominance plasticity in adults and through what mechanism remains unknown. Here, combining behavioral experiments, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and transcranial magnetic stimulation, we investigated whether reward enhances the short-term monocular deprivation effect and whether this enhancement reflects direct modulation of visual plasticity or operates through attentional control. We found that reward enhanced ocular dominance plasticity only when it remained task-relevant, whereas dissociating reward from the ongoing task abolished this effect. fMRI revealed reward-related activation in both the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and frontal eye field, and disrupting either region using continuous theta-burst stimulation (cTBS) eliminated the reward-induced enhancement of ocular dominance plasticity. Together, these findings demonstrate that reward influences visual plasticity indirectly through attentional control rather than through direct modulation, identifying attention as a gateway through which motivational signals shape adult sensory plasticity. Reward; attention; ocular dominance plasticity; short-term monocular deprivation; fMRI; cTBS Fangxing Song Guang Feng Mingfei Li Shiyu Lin Bing Hao Nan Li Min Bao EMBARGO https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ dataset Science Data Bank