title: Binocular rivalry from invisible patterns.
abstract: Binocular rivalry arises when incompatible images are presented to the two eyes. If the two eyes' conflicting features are invisible, leading to identical perceptual interpretations, does rivalry competition still occur? Here we investigated whether binocular rivalry can be induced from conflicting but invisible spatial patterns. A chromatic grating counterphase flickering at 30 Hz appeared uniform, but produced significant tilt aftereffect and orientation-selective adaptation. The invisible pattern also generated significant BOLD activities in the early visual cortex, with minimal response in the parietal and frontal cortical areas. Compared with perceptually matched uniform stimuli, a monocularly presented invisible chromatic grating enhanced the rivalry competition with a low-contrast visible grating presented to the other eye. Furthermore, switching from a uniform field to a perceptually matched invisible chromatic grating produced interocular suppression at approximately 200 ms after onset of the invisible grating. Experiments using briefly presented monocular probes revealed evidence for sustained rivalry competition between two invisible gratings during continuous dichoptic presentations. These findings indicate that even without visible interocular conflict, and with minimal engagement of frontoparietal cortex and consciousness related top-down feedback, perceptually identical patterns with invisible conflict features produce rivalry competition in the early visual cortex.
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China;
authors.forename: Jinyou
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Zou
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China; Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455 sheng@umn.edu zhangpeng@ibp.ac.cn.
authors.forename: Sheng
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: He
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China; sheng@umn.edu zhangpeng@ibp.ac.cn.
authors.forename: Peng
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Zhang
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001931:Brain Mapping; D003243:Consciousness; D023882:Dominance, Ocular / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D015357:Vision Disparity / Q000502:physiology*; D015348:Vision, Binocular / Q000502:physiology*; D014793:Visual Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: awareness; binocular rivalry; visual cortex