Neural substrates for depth perception of the Necker cube; a functional magnetic resonance imaging study in human subjects

Right parietal brain activity precedes perceptual alternation during binocular rivalry

“…The temporal order of activity suggests that those higher level areas become active before primary sensory areas which could be interpreted as top-down influence. The right inferior parietal lobe has been consistently identified in fMRI studies using bi-stable ambiguous stimuli [Inui et al, 2000;Kleinschmidt et al, 1998;Slotnick and Yantis, 2005] and binocular rivalry [Lumer et al, 1998;Lumer and Rees, 1999;Wilcke et al, 2009], but its function had been interpreted as an appraisal of the altered percept rather than its cause. This area has been found to be involved in change detection and change blindness [Beck et al, 2001[Beck et al, , 2006Kim and Blake, 2005;Pessoa and Ungerleider, 2004].…”

Neural Mechanisms for Binocular Depth, Rivalry and Multistability

“…It is possible that the TPJ was less active for monocular rivalry since the perceptual changes did not signal a change in object identity, as in binocular rivalry. All the other forms of multistability studied in fMRI paradigms produced some TPJ activation, including ambiguous figures [29,32,35,37], apparent motion [19,30,33] or structure from motion [36]. Hence a change in object identity and stimulus-driven shifts to unexpected events may be very relevant to the perceptual experience of binocular rivalry and other forms of multistability.…”

“…These parietal areas included superior parietal lobe [1,19,30,32,[34][35][36][37][38], intraparietal sulcus [1,19,29,30,[32][33][34][35][36][37][38] and temporoparietal junction [19,29,30,32,33,[35][36][37]. The frontal sites of activation which also could be related to attention included dorsolateral prefrontal cortex or middle frontal gyrus [1,19,31,32,[34][35][36], ventrolateral prefrontal cortex or inferior frontal gyrus [1,19,30,33]. Again, as was seen earlier for rivalry, a number of frontal areas were present which could be associated with attention or the preparation and execution of motor reports, such as frontal eye fields, anterior cingulate [1,19,29,[30][31][32]…”

“…The frontal sites of activation which also could be related to attention included dorsolateral prefrontal cortex or middle frontal gyrus [1,19,31,32,[34][35][36], ventrolateral prefrontal cortex or inferior frontal gyrus [1,19,30,33]. Again, as was seen earlier for rivalry, a number of frontal areas were present which could be associated with attention or the preparation and execution of motor reports, such as frontal eye fields, anterior cingulate [1,19,29,[30][31][32][33][34] and supplementary motor area [1,33,35,36]. These frontal and parietal areas were the most frequently reported sites of activation in these studies.…”

“…These frontal and parietal areas were the most frequently reported sites of activation in these studies. However, several studies confirmed that activation also occurs in occipital areas, including ventral occipital (fusiform gyrus) [1,29,32,36], medial temporal areas (hMT+) [19,30,32,33,[35][36][37][38] and areas V1, V2, V3, V3A or V4-d topo [1,5,31,32,37,38].…”