Abstract
There is ongoing debate as to whether binocular rivalry results from early competition between the two eyes or late competition between two percepts. Previous evidence that perceptual dominance durations are prolonged when simple stimuli engage in movement has been interpreted in terms of delayed local neural adaptation (Blake, Sobel & Gilrory, 2003). It is unclear whether this effect can be extended to rivalry between complex stimuli, which reach global levels of visual processing. Our study compared the effects of continuous stimulus movement on rivalry between simple checkerboard and complex face/house stimulus pairs (all of which were matched for mean luminance and contrast). The three characteristics of binocular rivalry under investigation were the median perceptual dominance durations, spatial coherence and suppression depth. Data collected from 25 participants indicated that, there was a significant interaction between image complexity and motion on perceptual dominance duration (F (1, 24) = 12.09 p F (1, 24) = 5.78, p F (1, 18) = 9.38, p [[lt]]0.01). We argued that such findings are more consistent with top-down perceptual switching mechanisms than with monocular adaptation mechanisms. It was concluded that if neural adaptation causes perceptual alternations, it probably does so at the level of the visual system at which stimuli are represented.