The changing face of perceptual rivalry.
Functional brain-imaging studies of house-face binocular rivalry and Rubin's vase-faces illusion have consistently reported face perception-dependent activity in the right fusiform gyrus. Here we use Rubin's illusion and report that activation of the left hemisphere by caloric vestibular stimulation increases the predominance of the faces percept in a substantial number of test subjects. While partially supporting the brain-imaging lateralization reports, our findings also challenge these studies by suggesting that neural mechanisms of Rubin's illusion cannot be limited to extrastriate perception-dependent processing. In accordance with our previously proposed interhemispheric switch model, the present findings support the notion that perceptual rivalry engages high-level cortical structures that mediate unihemispheric attentional selection.
Ngo
Trung T
TT
Vision Touch and Hearing Research Centre, School of Biomedical Sciences, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland 4072, Australia. trung.ngo@uq.edu.au
Liu
Guang B
GB
Tilley
Andrew J
AJ
Pettigrew
John D
JD
Miller
Steven M
SM
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D001931:Brain Mapping; D005145:Face; D007839:Functional Laterality; D006801:Humans; D007088:Illusions / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D015357:Vision Disparity; D015348:Vision, Binocular / Q000502:physiology*