Combined fMRI- and eye movement-based decoding of bistable plaid motion perception.
NeuroImage May 1, 2018 Gregor Wilbertz, Madhura Ketkar, Matthias Guggenmos et al.
Combining eye-tracking and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) improves the ability to decode which of two alternating perceptions a person is experiencing while viewing a bistable visual motion stimulus. Twenty participants viewed a plaid pattern that induces spontaneous perceptual switches and reported their perceptions. Using a support vector machine, multivoxel pattern analysis of fMRI data alone achieved 86% accuracy, eye-tracking alone 88% accuracy, and the combined approach reached 91% accuracy. This suggests that integrating brain and eye signals can reduce reliance on active verbal reports, which can confound studies of conscious perception, and may enable more effective no-report paradigms for investigating the neural correlates of consciousness.