Bistable perception alternates between internal and external modes of sensory processing

Abstract

Summary Perceptual history can exert pronounced effects on the contents of conscious experience: when confronted with completely ambiguous stimuli, perception does not waver at random between diverging stimulus interpretations but sticks with recent percepts for prolonged intervals. Here, we investigated the relevance of perceptual history in situations more similar to everyday experience, where sensory stimuli are usually not completely ambiguous. Using partially ambiguous visual stimuli, we found that the balance between past and present is not stable over time but slowly fluctuates between two opposing modes. For time periods of up to several minutes, perception was either largely determined by perceptual history or driven predominantly by disambiguating sensory evidence. Computational modeling suggested that the construction of unambiguous conscious experiences is modulated by slow fluctuations between internally and externally oriented modes of sensory processing.

Temporal Visual Patterns of Construction Hazard Recognition Strategies

“…Even though the purpose of safety training is to reinforce long-term knowledge and enhance the effect of "top-down" inspection, due to the heavy construction workload, workers' general perception starts from trivial signs and follows "heuristic" reasoning [61,62] to determine whether there are hazards, which is the "bottom-up" dominant cognitive model. This conforms to what psychology describes as the spontaneous interchange of "bistable perception" [63], which unconsciously shifts attention to prominent visual features of potential importance [64,65] that is, hazards closely related to workers [66]. This observation mode can be vividly described as "scene association type".…”

Mice alternate between discrete strategies during perceptual decision-making

“…The existence of disengaged and engaged states could reflect explore-exploit behavior [17,18,53], optimal learning (e.g., [4,25,29,50]), or could simply indicate incomplete learning of the task. Alternatively, if the states uncovered by our model reflect a similar underlying phenomenon to the internal and external modes of sensory processing observed in [69,70], it may be that they arise due to the limited information-processing capacity of the brain.…”

Bimodal inference in humans and mice

“…Between-mode fluctuations provide a potential solution to this question: In external mode, perceptual errors can provide an estimate of how reliably external sensory information is transmitted by feedforward processes. During internal mode, in turn, perceptual errors are more reflective of deviations in the strength of feedback that regulates how strongly perception is affected by internal predictions 18 . In the context of serial dependencies, this may help to decide whether an error was caused by overestimating the precision of incoming sensory information or, alternatively, by reyling too heavily on internal predictions provided by perceptual history.…”

“…In a second step, we sought to explain why perception cycles through periods of enhanced and reduced sensitivity to external information 4,5 . We reasoned that observers may intermittendly rely more strongly on internal information, i.e., on predictions about the environment that are constructed from previous experiences 19,31 .…”

“…Beyond the energy budget, spending time away from the ongoing stream of sensory inputs may also reflect a functional strategy that facilitates flexible behavior and learning 17 : Intermittently relying more strongly on information acquired from past experiences may enable agents to build up stable internal predictions about the environment despite an ongoing stream of external information 18 .…”