Abstract
During visual perception multiple relevant cues are often combined together as in a weighted average. Recent cue recruitment experiments show that the visual system can be conditioned to use artificial visual cues in perceiving a bistable stimulus (Haijiang et al., 2006). Is the newly recruited cue treated as an independent source of information even in presence of the trusted cues that were used to train it? Specifically, we conducted an experiment in which a newly recruited cue (stimulus location) and a pre-existing cue (binocular disparity) were put into conflict: they favored opposite directions in resolving the ambiguity of a rotating Necker Cube. The data demonstrate that both the new cue and the pre-existing one contribute, simultaneously, to the perceived 3D rotation direction. This result suggests the visual system uses the newly recruited cue in a fashion similar to a pre-existing cue, treating it as an independent source of information despite correlation was maintained during training. We also show that the new position cue was based primarily on retinal position, so early visual areas may mediate its effect.