The complexity of human subjective experience during binocular rivalry.

Perceptual transitions during binocular rivalry take many distinct forms, not just a simple alternation between two images. In 52 participants viewing pairs of different images, gratings, or moving dots, content analysis identified 20 unique categories of transition experience. Each person typically reported 2–3 different transition types per stimulus pair, and these categories remained consistent for the same observer over time but varied across individuals and stimulus content. The findings indicate that subjective visual experience during rivalry is richer and more complex than traditional discrete-response paradigms capture, and they suggest that neuroimaging studies of binocular rivalry may produce different results depending on how transitions are experienced.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Our subjective experience of the sensory information is rich and complex. Yet, typical cognitive and perception psychology paradigms reduce it to a few predefined discrete categories, like yes/no answers or the Likert scales. In the current study, we examined the complexity of subjective visual experience during binocular rivalry, a major experimental paradigm used to study conscious visual perception and its neural mechanisms. Binocular rivalry occurs when the two eyes are presented with two different images that cannot be fused into a uniform percept. As a result, the conscious perception alternates between the two images with brief transition phases in between. Fifty-two subjects viewed binocular rivalry produced by pairs of stimuli with different visual information (images, orthogonal gratings, or moving dots). After each rivalry period, they indicated how many different transition types they perceived and described their perception of each transition type. Using content analysis, we identified 20 unique categories over all subjects, sessions, and stimuli. On average, participants reported 2-3 unique transition categories for each visual stimulus combination. The categories were consistent for each observer over time but varied across participants and stimulus content. Our results show that perceptual transitions during binocular rivalry appear in different forms and depend on the specific visual stimulus content that induces rivalry. Our findings have implications for neuroimaging studies of binocular rivalry, which may yield different results depending on the exact experience of transitions. They also demonstrate how the complexity of subjective visual experience may be underestimated in traditional perception paradigms.