Color and Luminance Influence, but Can Not Explain, Binocular Rivalry Onset Bias

Abstract

When an observer is presented with dissimilar images to the right and left eye, the images will alternate every few seconds in a phenomenon known as binocular rivalry. During sustained viewing, the timing of these switches appears to be unpredictable. Recent research has suggested that the initial ‘onset’ period of rivalry is not random and may be different in its neural mechanism than subsequent dominance periods. It is known that differences in luminance and contrast have a significant influence on the average dominance during sustained rivalry and that perception of luminance can vary between individuals and across the visual field. We therefore investigated whether perception of luminance contrast plays a role in onset rivalry. Observers viewed rival targets of equal brightness for brief presentations in eight locations of the near periphery and reported the color that was first dominant in each location. Results show that minimizing differences in brightness and contrast yields a stronger pattern of onset dominance bias and reveals evidence of monocular dominance. The results suggest that both contrast and monocular dominance play a role in onset dominance, though neither can fully explain the effect.

Chronic and acute biases in perceptual stabilization

“…When subjects were asked to align near and distant targets in a sighting task, about two thirds used their right eye (Ehrenstein et al, 2005;Porac & Coren, 1976). Several studies have noted a chronic bias toward one eye or the other at the onset of binocular rivalry (Carter & Cavanagh, 2007;de Jong et al, 2012;Stanley et al, 2011). Further, chronic bias is not limited to binocular rivalry: Knapen et al (2009) and de Jong et al (2012) noted strong subject-specific bias to one direction of rotation at the onset of stimulation with a structurefrom-motion task, and Sundareswara and Schrater (2008) found a strong bias to the view from above in subjects shown the Necker cube.…”

“…In several large data sets, investigators have found a tendency for one eye to dominate during rivalry for a given subject, with the preferred eye varying among subjects (Ehrenstein, Arnold-Schulz-Gahmen, & Jaschinski, 2005;Ooi & He, 2001;Porac & Coren, 1976;Yang, Blake, & McDonald, 2010). Subject-specific chronic biases have been found in binocular rivalry (Carter & Cavanagh, 2007;Pearson & Clifford, 2004;Stanley, Carter, & Forte, 2011) and for other ambiguous stimuli, such as structure-from-motion (de Jong, Knapen, & van Ee, 2012;Knapen, Brascamp, Adams, & Graf, 2009) and the Necker cube (Sundareswara & Schrater, 2008).…”

Rivalry Onset in and around the Fovea: The Role of Visual Field Location and Eye Dominance on Perceptual Dominance Bias

“…One hallmark of the perceptual switching that is experienced while observing rivaling stimuli is that it is unpredictable which image will be perceived at a given time. Recent research has shown, however, that the initial conscious percept in rivalry is not random and that there is generally a bias towards a given image at this first stage [3][4][5][6][7].…”

“…There is, however, somewhat limited data on what factors affect the onset stage compared to ongoing rivalry, and these studies have had seemingly contradictory results in identifying correlations between onset bias and any bias in average dominance seen over sustained viewing [3,[7][8][9]. However, there are some stimulus factors that have been found to affect the likelihood of one image being dominant in consciousness both at onset and during sustained rivalry [5,6,10], including eye of presentation [4,7,9,11,12]. The clear role of eye of presentation at the onset of rivalry demonstrates that eye dominance is highly influential in the onset bias.…”

Predictive context biases binocular rivalry in children and adults with no positive relation to two measures of social cognition

“…In contrast, we observed substantial developmental effects for the RME test as well as numerically higher performance for adults compared to children in the SST, in line with previous reports of ToM-related improvements from childhood to adulthood 31 . For assessing the relationship between predictive effects at early perceptual stages and individual performance in ToM, we also controlled for eye dominance, as a potentially important additional source of variability for BR 13,48,49 . This joint analysis revealed that participants' eye imbalance (the degree to which one eye is more dominant than the other) explained a substantial amount of individual differences in BR onset effects.…”