General Validity of Levelt's Propositions Reveals Common Computational Mechanisms for Visual Rivalry

Abstract

The mechanisms underlying conscious visual perception are often studied with either binocular rivalry or perceptual rivalry stimuli. Despite existing research into both types of rivalry, it remains unclear to what extent their underlying mechanisms involve common computational rules. Computational models of binocular rivalry mechanisms are generally tested against Levelt's four propositions, describing the psychophysical relation between stimulus strength and alternation dynamics in binocular rivalry. Here we use a bistable rotating structure-from-motion sphere, a generally studied form of perceptual rivalry, to demonstrate that Levelt's propositions also apply to the alternation dynamics of perceptual rivalry. Importantly, these findings suggest that bistability in structure-from-motion results from active cross-inhibition between neural populations with computational principles similar to those present in binocular rivalry. Thus, although the neural input to the computational mechanism of rivalry may stem from different cortical neurons and different cognitive levels the computational principles just prior to the production of visual awareness appear to be common to the two types of rivalry.

United we sense, divided we fail: context-driven perception of ambiguous visual stimuli

“…Consequently, the representation of dots that move in the opposite direction will be stronger than that of dots moving in the same direction. This effect is comparable to an actual physical change in dot intensity that also biases a sphere stimulus to the interpretation with the stronger dots constituting the front or near side [42].…”

Top-down modulation in human visual cortex predicts the stability of a perceptual illusion

“…The power enhancement differed functionally from the target reappearance in that it also occurred during passive viewing of target stimulus onsets and depended on the presence of the mask. It seems likely that these functional differences are due to the inherent asymmetry of MIB and would not occur in symmetric bistable phenomena, such as binocular rivalry (Brascamp et al 2006) or 3D structure from motion (Klink et al 2008). Despite the differences in symmetry, recent psychophysical work (Bonneh et al 2014) establishes analogous dynamical properties for MIB as for the above two phenomena.…”

Filling-in rivalry: Perceptual alternations in the absence of retinal image conflict

“…Distributions of dominance durations have been shown to be well-approximated by gamma distributions for many types of perceptual alternations, including figure-ground reversals (Parkkonen, Andersson, Hämäläinen, & Hari, 2008), ambiguous structure-from-motion rotation (Klink, van Ee, & van Wezel, 2008), rivalry between filled-in and real images (Baek et al, 2012), rivalry between afterimages (Wade, 1975), and motion-induced blindness (Carter & Pettigrew, 2003), suggesting that they are governed by a common type of stochastic process. We found small positive autocorrelation coefficients in sequences of dominance durations, consistent with some earlier observations (van Ee, 2005, 2009).…”