Abstract
Binocular rivalry occurs when the information presented to the two eyes is inconsistent. Instead of fusing into a single stable image, perception alternates between multiple interpretations over time. Integration across space during rivalry can be affected by image content. Visual information presented to the same eye tends to be integrated into a dominant percept most of the time. This suggests that integration across space during rivalry occurs mostly at an early monocular level of processing. However, recent evidence suggest suppressed images are still represented at multiple levels of the visual processing hierarchy. This suggests that competition, and therefore also integration across space based on image-content also occurs at multiple stages of processing. Here we test this idea by capitalizing on known properties of the visual processing hierarchy. Since later visual areas have increasingly larger receptive fields, image-based integration should continue to facilitate dominance durations for integrated image-parts that are presented further apart. Eye-based integration, on the other hand, should decrease at larger image-part distances (IPD) since monocular channels are lost after the earliest stages of visual processing. We investigate eye- and image-based integration as a function of image-part distance (IPD). Results show that dominance durations are relatively stable when based on either image- or eye- integration. Moreover, effect sizes reveal that both eye-based and image-based integration have a similar relation with IPD. This suggests that image-based and eye-based rivalry occur at the same level of processing. Therefore, the formation of a dominant image does not appear to require integration at a later stage of visual processing.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2016