Binocular rivalry: dynamics, suppression strength & feature tuning
Summary
How does the human visual system deal with ambiguity in its visual input, or discrepancies between each eye's image? We investigate these questions using binocular rivalry, a type of visual stimulus that is perceptually ambiguous and causes the brain to change its mind every few seconds about what it is seeing. This process allows us to study how ambiguity is resolved and how one conscious percept is chosen over a competing one.
Supervisor(s)
Associate Professor David Alais
Research Location
Program Type
PHD
Synopsis
When the eyes are presented with images sufficiently different to prevent binocular matching, binocular rivalry will occur. Perceptually, this is experienced as an alternation of the monocular images every few seconds, with one eye dominant while the other is perceptually suppressed. Rivalry provides a tool for studying visual perception and consciousness because it involves a change in perceptual awareness without a change in the retinal stimuli: it is the brain changing its mind. We now know that successive visual processing stages modulate their activity in correlation with rivalry alternations, from the subcortex to high-level object-processing areas where auditory inputs also modulate neurons. Can auditory stimuli therefore influence the process of visual ambiguity resolution? At the lower levels of the visual system, where the binocular mismatch is first coded, neurons are very specifically tuned to particular features such as orientation or spatial frequency. Is the suppression of the rival image therefore specific to those neurons and the features they encode, or is suppression more global so that the whole eye suppressed? We will use a variety of perceptual and psychophysical experiments to answer these and further questions.
Additional Information
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Keywords
Perceptual ambiguity, binocular rivalry, rivalry suppression, auditory influences on rivalry
Opportunity ID
The opportunity ID for this research opportunity is: 961
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