One of the useful characteristics of adaptation is that it is selective to a particular group of “tuned” neurons. This specificity can be seen in the variety of forms of adaptation that have been reported. For example, adaptation can occur to image contrast (Crowder et al.,
2006; Solomon, Peirce, Dhruv, & Lennie,
2004), to orientation (e.g., Blakemore & Campbell,
1969), to motion (Mather, Verstraten, & Anstis,
1998), to spatial (Blakemore, Nachmias, & Sutton,
1970) and temporal (Saul & Cynader,
1989) frequency, to depth cues (Knapen & van Ee,
2006), and even to object content such as face identity (Leopold, O'Toole, Vetter, & Blanz,
2001; Webster & MacLin,
1999). Adaptation therefore is often used as a probe to try to identify the locus of particular visual processes, sometimes known as psychoanatomy (Julesz,
1971). Consequently, the neural loci of adaptation to various visual stimuli are better known than those for binocular rivalry. For this reason, manipulating the visual system's state of adaptation to various stimuli offers great potential for revealing otherwise hidden aspects of the neural processes underlying binocular rivalry and for dissecting the visual hierarchy thought to underlie binocular rivalry.