The ‘laws’ of binocular rivalry: 50 years of Levelt’s propositions

Abstract

It has been fifty years since Levelt's monograph On Binocular Rivalry (1965) was published, but its four propositions that describe the relation between stimulus strength and the phenomenology of binocular rivalry remain a benchmark for theorists and experimentalists even today. In this review, we will revisit the original conception of the four propositions and the scientific landscape in which this happened. We will also provide a brief update concerning distributions of dominance durations, another aspect of Levelt's monograph that has maintained a prominent presence in the field. In a critical evaluation of Levelt's propositions against current knowledge of binocular rivalry we will then demonstrate that the original propositions are not completely compatible with what is known today, but that they can, in a straightforward way, be modified to encapsulate the progress that has been made over the past fifty years. The resulting modified, propositions are shown to apply to a broad range of bistable perceptual phenomena, not just binocular rivalry, and they allow important inferences about the underlying neural systems. We argue that these inferences reflect canonical neural properties that play a role in visual perception in general, and we discuss ways in which future research can build on the work reviewed here to attain a better understanding of these properties.

Attention model of binocular rivalry

“…The model exhibits these phenomena because of the different temporal dynamics of mutual inhibition and attention. (iii) The relationship between dominance duration and input strength follows Levelt's propositions (10,25,26). These propositions are satisfied because of a combination of competition (from attentional modulation and mutual inhibition), recurrent excitation (from attentional modulation), and slow adaptation (6,38,39).…”

“…(ii) When the stimuli are rapidly swapped back and forth between the two eyes, the simulated percept either follows one image across the swapping or it follows the stimuli in one eye, depending on the temporal characteristics of the stimuli (21-24). (iii) The simulated dominance duration changes as a function of stimulus strength, following Levelt's propositions (25,26). Bifurcation analysis was used to explore all of the possible behaviors of the model as a function of the strength of sensory Significance Binocular rivalry provides a unique opportunity to characterize intrinsic neural dynamics of cortical processing.…”

Binocular rivalry outside the scope of awareness

“…Currently, however, binocular rivalry is mostly considered a hierarchical process (7,15) that comprises both low-level eye-based components and higher level pattern-based elements, with the precise locus of rivalry resolution depending on detailed stimulus characteristics. Phenomenological similarities between binocular rivalry and other forms of bistable perception (3,14) have promoted the implicit idea that the perceptual conflict resulting from dissimilar visual input is the driving force behind the perceptual alternations in binocular rivalry. Contrary to this view, Zou et al's results (10) show that the eye-based component of binocular rivalry can also be triggered in the absence of perceptual conflict.…”

“…Under these conditions, binocular rivalry takes over and visual awareness stochastically alternates between the conflicting images presented to the two eyes. Binocular rivalry has fascinated scientists for centuries because its characteristic dissociation of fluctuating perception and constant visual input offers an experimental window on the neural mechanisms of consciousness (2)(3)(4)(5). Although much of the experimental work on binocular rivalry has focused on stimulus parameters (3) and contextual influences (6) that modulate its phenomenology, or on the computational principles that could underlie perceptual alternations (7), the actual cause of binocular rivalry has received far less investigation.…”

Modeling infant visual preference as perceptual oscillation

“…Binocular rivalry is of special importance because a range of BR phenomena can be accounted for by a small set of "laws" [14] which encapsulate several important aspects of how variation in stimulus properties (particularly stimulus strength) affect the dynamics of perceptual oscillation. If visual preference exhibits similar adherence to these lawful relationships, then discussing visual learning in terms of changes in visual salience or the fidelity of perceptual representations of the stimulus could potentially be incorporated into our interpretations of any effects we observe on the dynamics of looking behavior.…”