title: Mountains and valleys: binocular rivalry and the flow of experience.
abstract: Binocular rivalry provides a useful situation for studying the relation between the temporal flow of conscious experience and the temporal dynamics of neural activity. After proposing a phenomenological framework for understanding temporal aspects of consciousness, we review experimental research on multistable perception and binocular rivalry, singling out various methodological, theoretical, and empirical aspects of this research relevant to studying the flow of experience. We then review an experimental study from our group explicitly concerned with relating the temporal dynamics of rivalrous experience to the temporal dynamics of cortical activity. Drawing attention to the importance of dealing with ongoing activity and its inherent changing nature at both phenomenological and neurodynamical levels, we argue that the notions of recurrence and variability are pertinent to understanding rivalry in particular and the flow of experience in general.
authors.affiliation: Laboratorio de Neurociencias Cognitivas, Departamento de Psiquiatría, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Marcoleta 391, Santiago de Chile, Chile. dcosmelli@uc.cl
authors.forename: Diego
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Cosmelli
authors.forename: Evan
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Thompson
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D003243:Consciousness / Q000502:physiology*; D023882:Dominance, Ocular / Q000502:physiology*; D005074:Evoked Potentials, Visual / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D015225:Magnetoencephalography; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D010470:Perceptual Masking / Q000502:physiology; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D011582:Psychological Theory; D012016:Reference Values; D014473:Unconscious, Psychology; D015357:Vision Disparity / Q000502:physiology; D015348:Vision, Binocular / Q000502:physiology*