Scale-freeness of dominant and piecemeal perceptions during binocular rivalry

Abstract

When two eyes are simultaneously stimulated by two inconsistent images, the observer's perception switches between the two images every few seconds such that only one image is perceived at a time. This phenomenon is named binocular rivalry (BR). However, sometimes the perceived image is a piecemeal mixed of two stimuli known as piecemeal perceptions. In this study, a BR task was designed in which orthogonal gratings are presented to the two eyes. The subjects were trained to report 3 states: dominant perceptions (two state matching to perceived grating orientation) and the piecemeal perceptions (third state). We explored the scale-freeness of the BR percept durations considering the two dominant monocular states as well as the piecemeal transition state using detrended fluctuation analysis. Our results reproduced the previous finding of memory in the perceptual switches between the monocular perception states. Moreover, we showed that such memory also exists in the transitory periods of dichoptic piecemeal perceptions. These results support our hypothesis that the pool of unstable piecemeal perceptions could be regarded as separate multiple low-depth basin in the perceptual state landscape. Likewise, the transitions from these piecemeal state basins and stable monocular state basins are faced with resistance. Therefore there is inertia and memory (i.e. positive serial correlation) for the piecemeal dichoptic perception states as well as the monocular states.

Relationships between short and fast brain timescales

“…Brain activity observed at both low and high temporal scales exhibits a 1=f a -like power spectrum (He et al 2010), including not just macroscopic electric oscillations, electroencephalography, magnetoencephalography and functional magnetic resonance imaging signals (He 2014), but also microscopic membrane potentials and fluctuations in neurotransmitter release (Milstein et al 2009;Linkenkaer-Hansen et al 2001). In particular, the temporal frequency spectrum of cerebral electric activity displays a scale-invariant behaviour S f ð Þ ¼ 1=f a , where S(f) is the power spectrum, f is the frequency and a is an exponent that equals the negative slope of the line in a log power versus log frequency plot (Bakouie et al 2017;Van de Ville et al 2010;Pritchard 1992). Pink noise can be regarded as an intrinsic property of the brain characterizing a large class of neuronal processes (Fraiman and Chialvo 2012;He et al 2010), suggesting the possibility that power law distributions contain information about how large-scale physiological and pathological outcomes arise from the interactions of many small-scale processes (de Arcangelis and Herrnann 2010).…”

Simulation of retinal ganglion cell response using fast independent component analysis

“…Such information may help us to omit obtaining redundant information of responses by means of numerical integration and thus improve simulation speed with minor assumptions induced. So studying general properties such as response sparseness is of a great importance (Bakouie et al 2017;Gravier et al 2016).…”

Guiding attention of faces through graph based visual saliency (GBVS)

“…In Binocular Rivalry (BR), two eyes are concurrently stimulated by two inconsistent images. Scale-freeness of the BR perception of two dominant monocular states and the piecemeal transition is analyzed in the method (Bakouie et al 2017).…”