Noise and adaptation in multistable perception: Noise drives when to switch, adaptation determines percept choice

Abstract

We study the dynamics of perceptual switching in ambiguous visual scenes that admit more than two interpretations/percepts to gain insight into the dynamics of perceptual multistability and its underlying neural mechanisms. We focus on visual plaids that are tristable and we present both experimental and computational results. We develop a firing-rate model based on mutual inhibition and adaptation that involves stochastic dynamics of multiple-attractor systems. The model can account for the dynamic properties (transition probabilities, distributions of percept durations, etc.) observed in the experiments. Noise and adaptation have both been shown to play roles in the dynamics of bistable perception. Here, tristable perception allows us to specify the roles of noise and adaptation in our model. Noise is critical in considering the time of a switch. On the other hand, adaptation mechanisms are critical in considering perceptual choice (in tristable perception, each time a percept ends, there is a possible choice between two new percepts).

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“…88 Ambiguous figures provide an excellent object to examine the resulting brain activity as a response to their presentation. 89,90 In this issue, Hramov et al 91 investigate the bistable perception of the Necker cube-a specific ambiguous figure. They consider the brain as a multistable dynamical system and analyze neurophysiological data of brain activity using an artificial neural network (ANN).…”

Estimating voluntary and involuntary attention in bistable visual perception: A MEG study

“…31 In 2005 Prinzmetal et al [2] introduced the idea of channel enhancement and 32 channel selection in order to show how the two kinds of attention manifest. Channel 33 enhancement is a process driven by voluntary attention that causes the visual system to 34 gather more information from the attended stimulus than from the unattended stimulus 35 specified by the informative cues. It changes the perceptual representation so that the 36 observers have a clearer view of the stimulus they are attending to [15][16][17].…”

“…With regards to degrees of 59 freedom, the simplest form of multistable perception is bistable perception, when two 60 different interpretations of the same stimulus are possible. There has been extensive 61 research on this topic over the last two decades and many descriptive models have been 62 proposed [31][32][33][34][35][36]. The switches between alternative percepts have been proposed to be 63 driven by stochastic processes in the brain [31,37] suppression is realized before binocular confluence, such as in the primary visual cortex 69 or the lateral geniculate nucleus [38][39][40] or after [41,42] was a matter of numerous 70 debates.…”