Plastic yielding in glassy solids has been interpreted as a strain-biased relaxation process, or, equivalently, as a strain-induced glass transition. The similarity between the structural relaxation induced by plastic deformation and thermal equilibrium of glasses has led to the formulation of the strain-temperature superposition principle. In the present work, the atomic motions caused by athermal plastic deformation of a binary Lennard-Jones glass are compared to thermal motion in the liquid in terms of the self part of the intermediate structure factor. A new approach is presented that allows to study the interplay of deformation-induced and thermal relaxation. It is found that these two processes occur independently of each other over a wide range of strain rates. (C) 2003 American Institute of Physics.