WHEN THE BRAIN CHANGES ITS MIND - INTEROCULAR GROUPING DURING BINOCULAR-RIVALRY

The prevalent view of binocular rivalry holds that it is a competition between the two eyes mediated by reciprocal inhibition among monocula r neurons. This view is largely due to the nature of conventional riva lry-inducing stimuli, which are pairs of dissimilar images with cohere nt patterns within each eye's image. Is it the eye of origin or the co herency of patterns that determines perceptual alternations between co herent percepts in binocular rivalry? We break the coherency of conven tional stimuli and replace them by complementary patchworks of intermi ngled rivalrous images. Can the brain unscramble the pieces of the pat chwork arriving from different eyes to obtain coherent percepts? We fi nd that pattern coherency in itself can drive perceptual alternations, and the patchworks are reassembled into coherent forms by most observ ers. This result is in agreement with recent neurophysiological and ps ychophysical evidence demonstrating that there is more to binocular ri valry than mere eye competition.