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Visual competition

Nature Reviews Neuroscience volume 3, pages 13–21 (2002)Cite this article

Key Points

  • Binocular rivalry occurs when one image is presented to a person's left eye and a different image to their right eye. The two images alternate in conscious perception. Rivalry is seen as a powerful tool with which to study visual perception and awareness, but there are many unanswered questions and controversies about its neural basis. The accumulating evidence suggests that multiple processes are involved in rivalry, and that these processes might be mediated by different neural substrates throughout the visual system.

  • The successive periods of dominance of the two rivalling stimuli are unpredictable in duration, but the dynamics of the alternation can be altered by varying the relative strengths of the two stimuli. The stronger stimulus will then be suppressed for shorter periods. Conscious attention can prolong the periods of dominance of the attended stimulus, and stimulus events that capture involuntary attention can rescue a stimulus from suppression. Placing a stimulus in a congruent context can also lengthen the periods for which it is dominant.

  • Local features that form a coherent global image can become entrained so that they become dominant or suppressed together, even if they are spread across the two eyes. The transitions that occur when one stimulus becomes suppressed and the other dominant tend to be gradual, rather than instantaneous — the newly dominant stimulus becomes visible at one point and then spreads, like a wave, across the visual field.

  • There is considerable indirect, psychophysical evidence that relates to the possible mechanisms of rivalry. Visual sensitivity and oculomotor reflexes are reduced for stimuli that are presented during suppression. Some visual aftereffects, such as the tilt aftereffect, which is thought to arise from adaptation in orientation-specific neurons in area V1, are unaffected by suppression of the inducing stimulus, whereas others, such as some motion aftereffects that depend on global rather than local motion, are reduced by suppression. These findings support the idea that suppression during rivalry is a cortical phenomenon.

  • More direct evidence comes from studies of human brain function using visual evoked responses, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and magnetoencephalography, which have all shown that neural responses to visual stimuli are suppressed when awareness of those stimuli is suppressed. fMRI studies have found a reliable modulation of signal by suppression even in V1, although in this area (unlike in extrastriate cortex) it is unclear whether the magnitude of this modulation is equal to that produced by physically turning the stimulus on and off.

  • Single-unit recordings in awake monkeys trained to report rivalry found no evidence of rivalry in neurons of the lateral geniculate nucleus, but showed that neural activity was modulated by rivalry throughout the visual cortex. The extent of this modulation, however, was modest in V1 and early extrastriate cortex, increasing in higher levels of the visual hierarchy. Inferotemporal neurons, for example, showed almost no activity when their preferred stimulus was suppressed.

  • Many questions remain unanswered. For example, what is rivalling during rivalry — the eye or the stimulus — and how can we explain the differences between the findings of the fMRI studies and those of single-unit recordings?

Abstract

Binocular rivalry — the alternations in perception that occur when different images are presented to the two eyes — has been the subject of intensive investigation for more than 160 years. The psychophysical properties of binocular rivalry have been well described, but newer imaging and electrophysiological techniques have not resolved the issue of where in the brain rivalry occurs. The most recent evidence supports a view of rivalry as a series of processes, each of which is implemented by neural mechanisms at different levels of the visual hierarchy. Although unanswered questions remain, this view of rivalry might allow us to resolve some of the controversies and apparent contradictions that have emerged from its study.

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Figure 1: Examples of some well-known ambiguous figures, the perceptual appearance of which fluctuates over time despite unchanging physical stimulation.
Figure 2: Binocular rivalry.
Figure 3: Visually evoked potentials recorded during rivalry.
Figure 4: Functional magnetic resonance images of rivalry.
Figure 5: Single-cell recordings during rivalry.

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Acknowledgements

Supported by the National Institutes of Health and the Max Planck Society. We thank C.-Y. Kim, S.-H. Lee and D. Leopold for comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Vanderbilt Vision Research Center, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, 37203, Tennessee, USA

    Randolph Blake

  2. Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Spemannstrasse 38, Tübingen, 72076, Germany

    Nikos K. Logothetis

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FURTHER INFORMATION

Binocular Rivalry

Sherrington, Charles Scott

MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Sciences

electrophysiology, electric and magnetic evoked fields

Helmholtz, Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von

James, William

magnetic resonance imaging

single-neuron recording

top–down processing in vision

visual anatomy and physiology

Glossary

AMBIGUOUS FIGURES

Images that can be interpreted as representing more than one object or scene.

MIRROR STEREOSCOPE

A device that uses mirrors to allow different images to be presented simultaneously to the two eyes of an observer.

STOCHASTIC PROCESS

A process of change governed by probabilities at each step.

ACCOMMODATION REFLEX

A reflex oculomotor response, involving contraction of the ciliary muscle to thicken the lens, that occurs when the focus of vision moves from a distant object to a near one.

OPTOKINETIC NYSTAGMUS

Involuntary, horizontal eye movements that allow the eyes to track a moving visual stimulus.

TILT AFTEREFFECT

If you stare at a set of lines that are tilted in one direction from upright, upright lines will subsequently look as though they are tilted in the opposite direction.

MOTION AFTEREFFECT

Also known as the waterfall illusion. Prolonged observation of a moving stimulus will lead to an aftereffect in which stationary objects appear to move in the opposite direction.

GAMMA DISTRIBUTION

A probability density function that plays an important role in statistics; the exponential distribution and chi-square distribution are special cases of the gamma distribution.

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Blake, R., Logothetis, N. Visual competition. Nat Rev Neurosci 3, 13–21 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn701

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