Experimental setup and paradigm. (A) Diagram illustrating the experimental setup: The rivalrous gratings were presented on an LCD monitor and reflected by an opaque mirror onto the haptic stimulus (grooved grating) location. (B) The haptic grating orientation was varied at each touch period by a servomotor. The temporal dynamics of haptic exploration were finely tracked with an LED-photoresistor system. (C) Experimental paradigm: After baseline measurements, the observers wore a translucent eye patch on their dominant eye for 150 min. After the deprivation, 8 × 4 min measurements were collected at 0, 5, 10, 15, 30, 45, 60, and 90 min from the patch removal.