This study examined two aspects of binocular function in patients with age-related macular degeneration (AMD): summation/inhibition of visual acuity and rivalry. The performance of 17 patients with AMD was compared with that of 17 elderly controls and 21 young people. Monocular and binocular acuities were measured using a multiple-E optotype test. Binocular ratios, defined as the better-eye acu...

How do selective and constructive visual mechanisms interact to determine the outcome of conscious perception? Binocular rivalry involves selective perception of one of two competing monocular images, whereas visual phantoms involve perceptual filling-in between two low-contrast collinear gratings. Recently, we showed that visual phantoms lead to neural filling-in of activity in V1 and V2, whic...

Telephone numbers +61 2 9351 9321 (voice) +61 2 9351 9520 (facsimile) Abstract Binocular rivalry is the alternating perception that occurs when incompatible stimuli are presented to the two eyes: one monocular stimulus dominates vision and then the other stimulus dominates, with a perceptual switch occurring every few seconds. There is a need for a binocular rivalry model that accounts for both...

Perceptual rivalry alternations are switches in perception that occur despite a constant, if ambiguous, sensory input. Whilst being clearly and predictably influenced by the ‘external’ rivalry-inducing stimulus (Levelt, 1965; Mueller & Blake, 1989), these internally driven changes in perceptual state have been found to exhibit rhythmic properties (Carter & Pettigrew, 2003). It is this endogenou...

We employ ambiguous figures and rivalrous stimuli that have multiple ambiguous properties to show that the different attributes of an ambiguous stimulus can undergo independent switching dynamics. This suggests that competition is distributed and attribute-specific, consistent with the known functional segregation of visual processing. Conflicting evidence that binocular rivalry is an early or ...

The visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) is a negative deflection in an event-related potential (ERP) between 200 and 400 ms after onset of an infrequent stimulus in a sequence of frequent stimuli. Binocular rivalry occurs when one image is presented to one eye and a different image is presented to the other. Although the images in the two eyes are unchanging, perception alternates unpredictably b...

There is an ongoing debate on whether binocular rivalry involves competition among monocular cells or binocular cells. We investigated this issue psychophysically with two specially designed test stimuli. One test stimulus contained monocular motion signals but greatly reduced binocular motion signals, while the other contained binocular motion signals but no monocular motion signals. For compa...

The influence of birth order on personality and sibling rivalry is controversial; little research has been conducted into academic sibling rivalry, and none into the connection with personality traits. This study considers the interaction of all three factors. Firstborns (N=22) and lastborns (N=24) completed online personality tests and an Academic Sibling Rivalry Questionnaire. Lastborns were ...

Binocular rivalry has been extensively studied to understand the mechanisms that control switches in visual awareness and much has been revealed about the contributions of stimulus and cognitive factors. Because visual processes are fundamentally adaptive, however, it is also important to understand how experience alters the dynamics of perceptual switches. When observers viewed binocular rival...

The human visual system usually receives input from two eyes that each capture a slightly different perspective of the world. Conscious visual perception, on the other hand, is unitary, and the brain uses the minor disparity between the two retinal projections as an important cue to reconstruct and perceive depth. This mechanism of binocular fusion falls apart when the input to the two eyes bec...