Multistage model for binocular rivalry.

Abstract

Binocular rivalry is the alternating perception that occurs when incompatible stimuli are presented to the two eyes: one monocular stimulus dominates vision and then the other stimulus dominates, with a perceptual switch occurring every few seconds. There is a need for a binocular rivalry model that accounts for both well-established results on the timing of dominance intervals and for more recent evidence on the distributed neural processing of rivalry. The model for binocular rivalry developed here consists of four parallel visual channels, two driven by the left eye and two by the right. Each channel consists of several consecutive processing stages representing successively higher cortical levels, with mutual inhibition between the channels at each stage. All stages are architecturally identical. With n the number of stages, the model is implemented as 4n nonlinear differential equations using a total of eight parameters. Despite the simplicity of its architecture, the model accounts for a variety of experimental observations: 1) the increasing depth of rivalry at higher cortical areas, as shown in electrophysiological, imaging, and psychophysical experiments; 2) the unimodal probability density of dominance durations, where the mode is less than the mean; 3) the lack of correlation between successive dominance durations; 4) the effect of interocular stimulus differences on dominance duration; and 5) eye suppression, as opposed to feature suppression. The model is potentially applicable to issues of visual processing more general than binocular rivalry.