Abstract
Several studies suggest that the neural concomitants of visual rivalry are contingent on the stimulus parameters. This suggests the existence of at least three different types of rivalry. Binocular rivalry occurs when dissimilar patterns are presented one to each eye and is seemingly mediated by interactions between pools of monocular neurons. Monocular rivalry occurs when superimposed patterns are presented to the same eye(s) and is presumably the result of competition between neural representations of the patterns themselves without regard to their eye of origin. Stimulus rivalry occurs when dissimilar patterns are swapped rapidly between the two eyes and is thus also independent of the eye from which an image is sourced. Here we integrate these three different types of rivalry into one stimulus. We find that perceptual alternations span the three types of rivalry, demonstrating that the brain can produce a coherent percept sourced from three different types of visual conflict. This result is in agreement with recent cross paradigm work suggesting that competitive visual stimuli are mediated by a general mechanism spanning different levels of the visual processing hierarchy.
Queen Elizabeth II Fellowship (CC), APA (JP) and Randolph Blake for helpful suggestions.