Contour interactions between pairs of Gabors engaged in binocular rivalry reveal a map of the association field

Gestalt formation promotes awareness of suppressed visual stimuli during binocular rivalry

Continuous flash suppression leverages binocular rivalry to render observers unaware of a static image for several seconds. To achieve this effect, rapidly flashing noise masks are presented to the dominant eye while a static stimulus is presented to the non-dominant eye. Eventually "breakthrough" occurs, wherein awareness shifts to the static image shown to the non-dominant eye. We tested the hypothesis that Gestalt formation can promote breakthrough. In two experiments, we presented pacman-shaped objects that might or might not align to form illusory Kanizsa objects. To measure the inception of breakthrough, observers were instructed to press a key at the moment of partial breakthrough. After pressing the key, which stopped the trial, observers reported how many pacmen were seen and where they were located. Supporting the Gestalt hypothesis, breakthrough was faster when the pacmen were aligned and observers more often reported pairs of pacmen if they were aligned. To address whether these effects reflected illusory shape perception, a computational model was applied to the pacman report distributions and breakthrough times for an experiment with four pacmen. A full account of the data required an increased joint probability of reporting all four pacmen, suggesting an influence of a perceived illusory cross.

Brief localised monocular deprivation in adults alters binocular rivalry predominance retinotopically and reduces spatial inhibition

Short-term deprivation (2.5 h) of an eye has been shown to boost its relative ocular dominance in young adults. Here, we show that a much shorter deprivation period (3–6 min) produces a similar paradoxical boost that is retinotopic and reduces spatial inhibition on neighbouring, non-deprived areas. Partial deprivation was conducted in the left hemifield, central vision or in an annular region, later assessed with a binocular rivalry tracking procedure. Post-deprivation, dominance of the deprived eye increased when rivalling images were within the deprived retinotopic region, but not within neighbouring, non-deprived areas where dominance was dependent on the correspondence between the orientation content of the stimuli presented in the deprived and that of the stimuli presented in non-deprived areas. Together, these results accord with other deprivation studies showing V1 activity changes and reduced GABAergic inhibition.

Continuous flash suppression operates in local spatial zones: Effects of mask size and contrast

Continuous flash suppression (CFS) is a technique in which presenting one eye with a dynamic Mondrian sequence prevents a low-contrast target in the other eye from being perceived for many seconds. Frequently used to study unconscious visual processing, CFS bears many similarities with binocular rivalry (BR), another popular dichoptic stimulation technique. It is therefore puzzling that the effect of mask size and contrast seem to differ between CFS and BR. To resolve this discrepancy, we conducted a systematic investigation on the effects of mask size and contrast in CFS. Also, building on findings from BR, we asked if the collinearity of the contours in the Mondrian masker play a role in CFS suppression. Our results showed a robust effect of mask contrast on suppression durations, and an effect of mask size that depended on collinearity. Specifically, higher mask contrasts produced longer suppression regardless of collinearity and mask size. Mask size, on the other hand, had little effect on suppression when collinearity was low and it weakened suppression when collinearity is high. These observations parallel prior findings in BR, further substantiating the close link between the two paradigms and demonstrating the usefulness of a shared explanatory framework describing both phenomena.

Persistent Biases in Binocular Rivalry Dynamics within the Visual Field

Binocular rivalry is an important tool for measuring sensory eye dominance-the relative strength of sensory processing in an individual's left and right eye. By dichoptically presenting images that lack corresponding visual features, one can induce perceptual alternations and measure the relative visibility of each eye's image. Previous results indicate that observers demonstrate reliable preferences for several image features, and that these biases vary within the visual field. However, evidence about the persistence of these biases is mixed, with some suggesting they affect only the onset (i.e., first second) of rivalry, and others suggesting lasting effects during prolonged viewing. We directly investigated individuals' rivalry biases for eye and color within the visual field and interestingly found results that mirrored the somewhat contradictory pattern in the literature. Each observer demonstrated idiosyncratic patterns of biases for both color and eye within the visual field, but consistent, prolonged biases only for the eye of presentation (sensory eye dominance, SED). Furthermore, the strength of eye biases predicted one's performance on a stereoacuity task. This finding supports the idea that binocular rivalry and other binocular visual functions m ay rely on shared mechanisms, and emphasizes the importance of SED as a measure of binocular vision.

When can attention influence binocular rivalry?

Attentional influence over perception is particularly pronounced when sensory stimulation is ambiguous, where attention can reduce stimulus uncertainty and promote a stable interpretation of the world. However, binocular rivalry, an extensively studied visual ambiguity, has proved to be comparatively resistant to attentional modulation. We hypothesize that this apparent inconsistency reflects fluctuations in the degree of unresolved competition during binocular rivalry. Namely, attentional influence over rivalry dynamics should be limited to phases of relatively unresolved stimulus competition, such as ends of individual dominance periods. We found that transient, feature-based cues congruent with the dominant stimulus prolonged dominance durations, while cues matching the suppressed stimulus hastened its return to dominance. Notably, the effect of cues depended on when the cues are presented. Cues presented late, but not early, during a given episode of perceptual dominance influenced rivalry dynamics. This temporal pattern mirrors known changes in the relative competitive dynamics of rival stimuli, revealing that selective effects occur only during temporal windows containing weak resolution of visual competition. In conclusion, these findings reveal that unresolved competition, which gates attention across a variety of domains, is also crucial in determining the susceptibility of binocular rivalry to selective influences.

Disambiguating the roles of area V1 and the lateral occipital complex (LOC) in contour integration

Contour integration, the linking of collinear but disconnected visual elements across space, is an essential facet of object and scene perception. Here, we set out to arbitrate between two previously advanced mechanisms of contour integration: serial facilitative interactions between collinear cells in the primary visual cortex (V1) versus pooling of inputs in higher-order visual areas. To this end, we used high-density electrophysiological recordings to assess the spatio-temporal dynamics of brain activity in response to Gabor contours embedded in Gabor noise (so-called "pathfinder displays") versus control stimuli. Special care was taken to elicit and detect early activity stemming from the primary visual cortex, as indexed by the C1 component of the visual evoked potential. Arguing against a purely early V1 account, there was no evidence for contour-related modulations within the C1 timeframe (50-100 ms). Rather, the earliest effects were observed within the timeframe of the N1 component (160-200 ms) and inverse source analysis pointed to principle generators in the lateral occipital complex (LOC) within the ventral visual stream. Source anlaysis also suggested that it was only during this relatively late processing period that contextual effects emerged in hierarchically early visual regions (i.e. V1/V2), consistent with a more distributed process involving recurrent feedback/feedforward interactions between LOC and early visual sensory regions. The distribution of effects uncovered here is consistent with pooling of information in higher order cortical areas as the initial step in contour integration, and that this pooling occurs relatively late in processing rather than during the initial sensory-processing period.

Crossmodal constraints on human perceptual awareness: auditory semantic modulation of binocular rivalry

We report a series of experiments utilizing the binocular rivalry paradigm designed to investigate whether auditory semantic context modulates visual awareness. Binocular rivalry refers to the phenomenon whereby when two different figures are presented to each eye, observers perceive each figure as being dominant in alternation over time. The results demonstrate that participants report a particular percept as being dominant for less of the time when listening to an auditory soundtrack that happens to be semantically congruent with the other alternative (i.e., the competing) percept, as compared to when listening to an auditory soundtrack that was irrelevant to both visual figures (Experiment 1A). When a visually presented word was provided as a semantic cue, no such semantic modulatory effect was observed (Experiment 1B). We also demonstrate that the crossmodal semantic modulation of binocular rivalry was robustly observed irrespective of participants’ attentional control over the dichoptic figures and the relative luminance contrast between the figures (Experiments 2A and 2B). The pattern of crossmodal semantic effects reported here cannot simply be attributed to the meaning of the soundtrack guiding participants’ attention or biasing their behavioral responses. Hence, these results support the claim that crossmodal perceptual information can serve as a constraint on human visual awareness in terms of their semantic congruency.

An integrated framework of spatiotemporal dynamics of binocular rivalry

Fluctuations in perceptual dominance during binocular rivalry exhibit several hallmark characteristics. First, dominance switches are not periodic but, instead, stochastic: perception changes unpredictably. Second, despite being stochastic, average durations of rivalry dominance vary dependent on the strength of the rival stimuli: variations in contrast, luminance, or spatial frequency produce predictable changes in average dominance durations and, hence, in alternation rate. Third, perceptual switches originate locally and spread globally over time, sometimes as traveling waves of dominance: rivalry transitions are spatiotemporal events. This essay (1) reviews recent advances in our understanding of the bases of these three hallmark characteristics of binocular rivalry dynamics and (2) provides an integrated framework to account for those dynamics using cooperative and competitive spatial interactions among local neural circuits distributed over the visual field's retinotopic map. We close with speculations about how that framework might incorporate top-down influences on rivalry dynamics.

Dynamics of temporally interleaved percept-choice sequences: interaction via adaptation in shared neural populations

At the onset of visually ambiguous or conflicting stimuli, our visual system quickly ‘chooses’ one of the possible percepts. Interrupted presentation of the same stimuli has revealed that each percept-choice depends strongly on the history of previous choices and the duration of the interruptions. Recent psychophysics and modeling has discovered increasingly rich dynamical structure in such percept-choice sequences, and explained or predicted these patterns in terms of simple neural mechanisms: fast cross-inhibition and slow shunting adaptation that also causes a near-threshold facilitatory effect. However, we still lack a clear understanding of the dynamical interactions between two distinct, temporally interleaved, percept-choice sequences—a type of experiment that probes which feature-level neural network connectivity and dynamics allow the visual system to resolve the vast ambiguity of everyday vision. Here, we fill this gap. We first show that a simple column-structured neural network captures the known phenomenology, and then identify and analyze the crucial underlying mechanism via two stages of model-reduction: A 6-population reduction shows how temporally well-separated sequences become coupled via adaptation in neurons that are shared between the populations driven by either of the two sequences. The essential dynamics can then be reduced further, to a set of iterated adaptation-maps. This enables detailed analysis, resulting in the prediction of phase-diagrams of possible sequence-pair patterns and their response to perturbations. These predictions invite a variety of future experiments.

Binocular rivalry: competition and inhibition in visual perception

When the brain is presented with ambiguous visual stimuli supporting two interpretations, perception becomes bistable and alternates over time between one interpretation and the other. This process contains elements of competition (between the rivaling percepts) as well as inhibition, as the percepts are mutually exclusive so that one is always suppressed. This review covers the most widely studied form of bistable perception-binocular rivalry. Suppression in rivalry is covered in detail, including discussion of its general and specific components, its local nature and spatial organization, techniques for quantifying it, and the role of global feedback. The competitive dynamics of rivalry are discussed within the context of the classical 'adapting reciprocal inhibition' model of rivalry and recent evidence supporting this model is discussed. This model is contrasted with alternative models based on late competition and with hybrid models. Finally, the role of attention in rivalry is examined and commonalities with other forms of bistable perception are noted. WIREs Cogn Sci 2012, 3:87-103. doi: 10.1002/wcs.151 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

Vision and audition do not share attentional resources in sustained tasks

Our perceptual capacities are limited by attentional resources. One important question is whether these resources are allocated separately to each sense or shared between them. We addressed this issue by asking subjects to perform a double task, either in the same modality or in different modalities (vision and audition). The primary task was a multiple object-tracking task (Pylyshyn and Storm, 1988), in which observers were required to track between 2 and 5 dots for 4 s. Concurrently, they were required to identify either which out of three gratings spaced over the interval differed in contrast or, in the auditory version of the same task, which tone differed in frequency relative to the two reference tones. The results show that while the concurrent visual contrast discrimination reduced tracking ability by about 0.7 d′, the concurrent auditory task had virtually no effect. This confirms previous reports that vision and audition use separate attentional resources, consistent with fMRI findings of attentional effects as early as V1 and A1. The results have clear implications for effective design of instrumentation and forms of audio–visual communication devices.

Binocular vision

This essay reviews major developments - empirical and theoretical - in the field of binocular vision during the last 25years. We limit our survey primarily to work on human stereopsis, binocular rivalry and binocular contrast summation, with discussion where relevant of single-unit neurophysiology and human brain imaging. We identify several key controversies that have stimulated important work on these problems. In the case of stereopsis those controversies include position vs. phase encoding of disparity, dependence of disparity limits on spatial scale, role of occlusion in binocular depth and surface perception, and motion in 3D. In the case of binocular rivalry, controversies include eye vs. stimulus rivalry, role of "top-down" influences on rivalry dynamics, and the interaction of binocular rivalry and stereopsis. Concerning binocular contrast summation, the essay focuses on two representative models that highlight the evolving complexity in this field of study.

Modulation of spatiotemporal dynamics of binocular rivalry by collinear facilitation and pattern-dependent adaptation

The role of collinear facilitation was investigated to test predictions of a model for traveling waves of dominance during binocular rivalry (H. Wilson, R. Blake, & S. Lee, 2001). In Experiment 1, we characterized traveling wave dynamics using a recently developed technique called periodic perturbation (M.-S. Kang, D. Heeger, & R. Blake, 2009). Results reveal that the propagation speed of waves for a collinear stimulus increased regardless of whether that stimulus was suppressed (replicating earlier work) or dominant; this latter finding is contrary to the model's prediction. In Experiment 2, we measured perceptual dominance durations within a localized region in the center of two rival stimuli that varied in degree of collinearity. Results reveal that increased collinearity did not change average dominance durations regardless of the rivalry phase of the stimulus, again contrary to the model's prediction. Incorporating pattern-dependent modulation of adaptation rate into the model accounted for results from both experiments. Using model simulations, we show how interactions between collinear facilitation and pattern-dependent adaptation may influence the dynamics of binocular rivalry. We also discuss alternative interpretations of our findings, including the possible role of surround suppression.

Accessing the meaning of invisible words

Previous research has shown implicit semantic processing of faces or pictures, but whether symbolic carriers such as words can be processed this way remains controversial. Here we examine this issue by adopting the continuous flash suppression paradigm to ensure that the processing undergone is indeed unconscious without the involvement of partial awareness. Negative or neutral words projected into one eye were made invisible due to strong suppression induced by dynamic-noise patterns shown in the other eye through binocular rivalry. Inverted and scrambled words were used as controls to provide baselines at orthographic and feature levels, respectively. Compared to neutral words, emotion-described and emotion-induced negative words required longer time to release from suppression, but only for upright words. These results suggest that words can be processed unconsciously up to semantic level since under interocular suppression completely invisible words can lead to different processing speed due to the emotion information they carry.

Natural images dominate in binocular rivalry

Ecological approaches to perception have demonstrated that information encoding by the visual system is informed by the natural environment, both in terms of simple image attributes like luminance and contrast, and more complex relationships corresponding to Gestalt principles of perceptual organization. Here, we ask if this optimization biases perception of visual inputs that are perceptually bistable. Using the binocular rivalry paradigm, we designed stimuli that varied in either their spatiotemporal amplitude spectra or their phase spectra. We found that noise stimuli with "natural" amplitude spectra (i.e., amplitude content proportional to 1/f, where f is spatial or temporal frequency) dominate over those with any other systematic spectral slope, along both spatial and temporal dimensions. This could not be explained by perceived contrast measurements, and occurred even though all stimuli had equal energy. Calculating the effective contrast following attenuation by a model contrast sensitivity function suggested that the strong contrast dependency of rivalry provides the mechanism by which binocular vision is optimized for viewing natural images. We also compared rivalry between natural and phase-scrambled images and found a strong preference for natural phase spectra that could not be accounted for by observer biases in a control task. We propose that this phase specificity relates to contour information, and arises either from the activity of V1 complex cells, or from later visual areas, consistent with recent neuroimaging and single-cell work. Our findings demonstrate that human vision integrates information across space, time, and phase to select the input most likely to hold behavioral relevance.

Size matters: a study of binocular rivalry dynamics

W.J.M. Levelt systematized the influence of stimulus strength on binocular rivalry dynamics in several formal propositions. His counterintuitive 2nd proposition states that mean dominance duration of one eye's stimulus depends not on the strength of that stimulus but, instead, on the strength of the stimulus viewed by the other eye. Some studies have reported results consistent with this proposition but others have found violations of the proposition. This paper examines the dynamics of binocular rivalry by changing the size of rival stimuli and the tracking instructions during rivalry tracking periods in which the contrasts of the two rival stimuli are varied independently. Levelt's 2nd proposition was validated when those stimuli were large, but it was violated when the rival stimuli were small, suggesting that the dynamics of binocular rivalry are spatiotemporal in nature. A simple energy model with coupling among neighboring areas of rivalry can account for these findings. Other dynamics depending on the size of rival stimuli are discussed.

Caloric vestibular stimulation reveals discrete neural mechanisms for coherence rivalry and eye rivalry: A meta-rivalry model

Binocular rivalry is an extraordinary visual phenomenon that has engaged investigators for centuries. Since its first report, there has been vigorous debate over how the brain achieves the perceptual alternations that occur when conflicting images are presented simultaneously, one to each eye. Opposing high-level/stimulus-representation models and low-level/eye-based models have been proposed to explain the phenomenon, recently merging into an amalgam view. Here, we provide evidence that during viewing of Díaz-Caneja stimuli, coherence rivalry -- in which aspects of each eye's presented image are perceptually regrouped into rivalling coherent images -- and eye rivalry operate via discrete neural mechanisms. We demonstrate that high-level brain activation by unilateral caloric vestibular stimulation shifts the predominance of perceived coherent images (coherence rivalry) but not half-field images (eye rivalry). This finding suggests that coherence rivalry (like conventional rivalry according to our previous studies) is mediated by interhemispheric switching at a high level, while eye rivalry is mediated by intrahemispheric mechanisms, most likely at a low level. Based on the present data, we further propose that Díaz-Caneja stimuli induce 'meta-rivalry' whereby the discrete high- and low-level competitive processes themselves rival for visual consciousness.

Neural bases of binocular rivalry

During binocular rivalry, conflicting monocular images compete for access to consciousness in a stochastic, dynamical fashion. Recent human neuroimaging and psychophysical studies suggest that rivalry entails competitive interactions at multiple neural sites, including sites that retain eye-selective information. Rivalry greatly suppresses activity in the ventral pathway and attenuates visual adaptation to form and motion; nonetheless, some information about the suppressed stimulus reaches higher brain areas. Although rivalry depends on low-level inhibitory interactions, high-level excitatory influences promoting perceptual grouping and selective attention can extend the local dominance of a stimulus over space and time. Inhibitory and excitatory circuits considered within a hybrid model might account for the paradoxical properties of binocular rivalry and provide insights into the neural bases of visual awareness itself.