Presenting the eyes with spatially mismatched images causes a phenomenon known as binocular rivalry-a fluctuation of awareness whereby each eye's image alternately determines perception. Binocular rivalry is used to study interocular conflict resolution and the formation of conscious awareness from retinal images. Although the spatial determinants of rivalry have been well-characterized, the te...

BACKGROUND Binocular rivalry is a complex process characterised by alternations in perceptual suppression and dominance that result when two different images are presented simultaneously to the left and right eyes. It has been reported recently that the addition of contextual cues will promote the predominance of the context consistent rivalry target. In contrast to Levelt's second proposition ...

During binocular rivalry visual consciousness fluctuates between two dissimilar monocular images. We investigated the role of attention in this phenomenon by comparing event-related potentials (ERPs) when binocular-rivalry stimuli were attended with when they were unattended. Stimuli were dichoptic, orthogonal gratings that yielded binocular rivalry and dioptic, identically oriented gratings th...

Binocular rivalry has been used to study a wide range of visual processes, from the integration of low-level features to the selection of signals that reach awareness. However, many of these studies do not distinguish between early and late phases of rivalry. There is clear evidence that the "onset" stage of rivalry is characterized by stable, yet idiosyncratic biases that are not evident in th...

The effects of attention, as well as its functional utility, are particularly prominent when selecting among multiple stimuli that compete for processing resources. However, existing studies have found that binocular rivalry-a phenomenon characterized by perceptual competition between incompatible stimuli presented to the two eyes-is only modestly influenced by selective attention. Here, we dem...

To test whether the binocular contour rivalry mechanism is tritanopic, we presented isoluminant, rival stimuli visible only via the short-wavelength-sensitive (S) cones. We stimulated only the S cones with violet gratings superimposed on a bright yellow field that adapted the responses of the middle- and long-wavelength-sensitive (M and L) cones. We found that an S-cone grating presented to one...

Binocular rivalry is a phenomenon in which perception spontaneously shifts between two different images that are dichoptically presented to the viewer. By elucidating the cortical networks responsible for these stochastic fluctuations in perception, we can potentially learn much about the neural correlates of visual awareness. We obtained concurrent EEG-fMRI data for a group of 20 healthy human...

A question raised a long time ago in binocular rivalry research is whether the phenomenon of binocular rivalry is purely determined by local stimulus properties or that global stimulus properties also play a role. More specifically: do coherent features in a stimulus influence rivalrous behavior? After decades of underexposure of the subject, recently this question seemed to be answered in the ...

A psychophysical study was conducted to investigate contour interactions (the 'association field'). Two Gabor patches were presented to one eye, with random-dot patches in corresponding locations of the other eye so as to produce binocular rivalry. Perceptual alternations of the two rivalry processes were monitored continuously by observers and the two time series were cross-correlated. The Gab...