Abstract
Aim: Images that resist binocular fusion undergo alternating periods of dominance and suppression, similar to ambiguous figures, whose percepts alternate between different interpretations. It has been well documented that a binocularly rivalrous target that forms part of a global form in the same eye tends to become perceptually dominant. This parallels similar effects of spatial context in ambiguous figure perception. Here we examine whether binocular rivalry exhibits perceptual binding properties to a binocular spatial context that parallels the effects shown by us at VSS last year for ambiguous figures (Ouhnana & Kingdom, 2015 JOV, 15.12, 842). Method: Observers indicated via key-press the perceived motion direction of a skeleton cube rotating in opposite directions in the two eyes, or of a rotating ambiguous Necker cube cube, with both types of stimuli presented above or below a fixation dot. A rotating unambiguous context skeleton cube was presented the other side of fixation. The rotation direction of the context figure was randomly changed during each 30s trial. The data was subject to a form of reverse correlation analysis that established the correlation between the motion reversals of the context and that of the target figures. Results: The perceived changes in motion direction of both the rivalrous- and ambiguous-target figures were found to be dependent on the motion of the spatial context. Both correlations and coherent percept predominance of context and target were found to be significantly higher than would be expected if these two were independent. Conclusion: Perceptual binding of both rivalrous and ambiguous figures to a spatial context appear to be mediated by a similar shared rivalry/ambiguity process.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2016