Abstract
Recent studies indicate that attention influences or even enables the alterations in perception when two different images engaged in binocular rivalry (Brascamp & Blake, 2012; Zhang et al., 2011). If attention is necessary for two different items to undergo binocular rivalry, it is possible that attention facilitates one of the competing images to achieve dominance over the other. Here we tested this prediction by measuring proportion of mixed dominance in the initial phase of binocular rivalry. In Experiment 1, four, equally spaced concentric rings were rotated along an imagery circle for two seconds while the center of each ring was flickered with different colors. Participants' attention was manipulated by asking them to track two rings located in the opposite sides and to detect a cued color while ignoring the other two rings. Rival stimuli were then presented one of those four locations, resulting in that the rival stimuli occupied either one of the two attended locations (attended condition) or one of the two unattended locations (unattended condition). We compared the proportion of mixed dominance between the attended and unattended conditions while varying the duration of rival stimuli from 50 ms to 1050 ms. As a result, the proportion of mixed dominance was significantly smaller in the attended condition than in the unattended condition when the rival stimuli lasted for 300 ms. In Experiment 2, we replicated Experiment 1 with finer stimulus durations from 50 ms to 350 ms (the interaction between the stimulus duration and attention was statistically significant). These results suggest that attention facilitates the initiation of binocular rivalry, providing converging evidence that attention is necessary for binocular rivalry.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2014