A Hierarchical Model of Visual Rivalry

Binocular rivalry is the alternating percept that can result when the two eyes see different scenes. Recent psychophysical evidence supports an account for one component of binocular rivalry similar to that for other bistable percepts. We test the hypothesis that alternation can be generated by competition between top-down cortical explanations for the inputs, rather than by direct competition between the inputs. Recent neurophysiological evidence shows that some binocular neurons are modulated with the changing percept; others are not, even if they are selective between the stimuli presented to the eyes. We extend our model to a hierarchy to address these effects.

[1]  C. Wheatstone.  XVIII. Contributions to the physiology of vision. —Part the first. On some remarkable, and hitherto unobserved, phenomena of binocular vision , 1962, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.

[2]  Charles Wheatstone.  On some remarkable and hitherto unobserved phenomena of binocular vision. , 1962 .

[3]  W. Levelt.  On binocular rivalry , 1965 .

[4]  R. Fox,et al.  Binocular rivalry and reciprocal inhibition , 1969 .

[5]  R. Fox,et al.  Increment detection thresholds during binocular rivalry suppression , 1970 .

[6]  R. Fox,et al.  Independence between binocular rivalry suppression duration and magnitude of suppression. , 1972, Journal of experimental psychology.

[7]  R. Fox,et al.  Binocular rivalry suppression: insensitive to spatial frequency and orientation change. , 1974, Vision research.

[8]  P. Walker.  Stochastic properties of binocular rivalry alternations , 1975 .

[9]  R. Blake,et al.  What is Suppressed during Binocular Rivalry? , 1980, Perception.

[10]  J. Wolfe.  Stereopsis and binocular rivalry. , 1986, Psychological review.

[11]  S Grossberg,et al.  Cortical dynamics of three-dimensional form, color, and brightness perception: II. Binocular theory , 1988, Perception & psychophysics.

[12]  S. R. Lehky.  An Astable Multivibrator Model of Binocular Rivalry , 1988, Perception.

[13]  Judea Pearl,et al.  Probabilistic reasoning in intelligent systems - networks of plausible inference , 1991, Morgan Kaufmann series in representation and reasoning.

[14]  R. Blake.  A Neural Theory of Binocular Rivalry , 1989 .

[15]  N. Logothetis,et al.  Neuronal correlates of subjective visual perception. , 1989, Science.

[16]  T. Mueller.  A physiological model of binocular rivalry , 1990, Visual Neuroscience.

[17]  Randolph Blake,et al.  Organization of Binocular Pathways: Modeling and Data Related to Rivalry , 1991, Neural Computation.

[18]  M. Carandini,et al.  Summation and division by neurons in primate visual cortex. , 1994, Science.

[19]  Michael I. Jordan,et al.  MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE LABORATORY and CENTER FOR BIOLOGICAL AND COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING DEPARTMENT OF BRAIN AND COGNITIVE SCIENCES , 1996 .

[20]  Bialek,et al.  Random switching and optimal processing in the perception of ambiguous signals. , 1995, Physical review letters.

[21]  Geoffrey E. Hinton,et al.  The Helmholtz Machine , 1995, Neural Computation.

[22]  Geoffrey E. Hinton,et al.  The "wake-sleep" algorithm for unsupervised neural networks. , 1995, Science.

[23]  Geoffrey E. Hinton,et al.  Varieties of Helmholtz Machine , 1996, Neural Networks.

[24]  N. Logothetis,et al.  What is rivalling during binocular rivalry , 1996 .

[25]  N. Logothetis,et al.  Activity changes in early visual cortex reflect monkeys' percepts during binocular rivalry , 1996, Nature.