Do recognizable figures enjoy an advantage in binocular rivalry?

Abstract

Five experiments examined whether recognizable stimuli predominate in binocular rivalry. It was found that a face predominated more than did a pattern equated for spatial frequency, luminance, and contrast; an objective reaction time procedure confirmed predominance of the face. The face was still liable to fragmentation as stimulus size increased. Observers tracked exclusive dominance of a picture of a camouflaged figure (a Dalmatian dog) prior to and then following discovery of the figure's presence; control observers received the same protocol with a scrambled version of the dog stimulus. Compared with control results, predominance of the dog picture was higher even before observers knew of the camouflaged figure. Inversion of the dog figure reduced its predominance. Binocular rivalry is sensitive to object-related, configural properties of a stimulus.

Onset rivalry: factors that succeed and fail to bias selection

“…Many reported top-down effects on binocular rivalry found in the past have been criticized because phenomenological reports of the dominant percept are subjective and may be susceptible to extraneous variables (e.g., Losciuto & Hartley, 1963;Walker, 1978;Yu & Blake, 1992). Examples include response bias (individual differences in response threshold) and demand characteristics (observers base their answers on the perceived expectations of the experimenter).…”

Binocular rivalry between emotional and neutral stimuli: A validation using fear conditioning and EEG

“…In more basic and holistic processing of pictorial stimuli predominance of meaningful stimuli is more likely. Indeed, in a series of well-controlled experiments, Yu and Blake (1992) demonstrated elegantly that images which are readily and unambiguously organized predominate more in binocular rivalry than pictures which have the same luminance and contrast but are lacking a coherent organization. This is strong evidence for the influence of the meaning of pictures in binocular rivalry but does not allow us to conclude that emotional content can influence rivalry in a pair of two meaningful pictures.…”

A Hierarchical Model of Binocular Rivalry

“…The dynamics of rivalry are sensitive to the contrast of the stimuli in the eyes if they are different, with such characteristic results as that increasing the contrast of one stimulus decreases the time during which that stimulus is suppressed much more than it increases the time that it is dominant (Levelt, 1965;Fox & Rasche, 1969;Blake, 1977;Mueller & Blake, 1989). There are also effects of the nature of the stimuli -for instance if two separate patterns are divided up between the two stimuli, then, in certain cases, the patterns will rival rather than the stimuli directly (Whittle, Bloor, Pocock, 1968;Kovacs, Papathomas, Yang & Feher, 1996), and there is some evidence that familiar patterns enjoy an advantage over unfamiliar ones during rivalry (see Yu & Blake, 1992).…”