Abstract
One of the most fundamental and unresolved problems in awareness research concerns the primitives involved in the phenomenal experience during perceptual bi-stability. Resolving this problem is critical for both computational theory and neurophysiological investigations into awareness.
We have developed novel paradigms, employing competing visual stimulation and competing auditive stimulation to study perceptual ambiguity resolution. We have demonstrated quantitatively, using a straightforward basic “first-principles” neural model, that neural gain modulation at early cortical stages, driven by top-down feedback, is sufficient to explain all reported data on perceptual decisions, including those for varying stimulus timing, history dependence, cross-modal influence and voluntary attentional control.