title: Ensemble cortical responses to rival visual stimuli: effect of monocular transient.
abstract: Binocular rivalry is a fascinating perceptual phenomenon that has been characterized extensively at the psychophysical level. However, the underlying neural mechanism remains poorly understood. In particular, the role of the early visual pathway remains controversial. In this study, we used voltage-sensitive dye imaging to measure the spatiotemporal activity patterns in cat area 18 evoked by dichoptic orthogonal grating stimuli. We found that after several seconds of monocular stimulation with an oriented grating, an orthogonal stimulus to the other eye evoked a reversal of the cortical response pattern, which may contribute to flash suppression in perception. Furthermore, after several seconds of rival binocular stimulation with unequal contrasts, transient increase in the contrast of the weak stimulus evoked a long-lasting cortical response. This transient-triggered response could contribute to the perceptual switch during binocular rivalry. Together, these results point to a significant contribution of early visual cortex to transient-triggered switch in perceptual dominance.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Neuroscience and State Key Laboratory of Neuroscience, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 320 Yue-Yang Road, Shanghai 200031, China. wenyq@ion.ac.cn
authors.forename: Yunqing
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Wen
authors.forename: Qingfang
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Zhang
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D002415:Cats; D005074:Evoked Potentials, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D015348:Vision, Binocular; D015349:Vision, Monocular; D014793:Visual Cortex / Q000502:physiology*