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- Diego J. Cosmelli & Evan Thompson, Mountains and Valleys: Binocular Rivalry and the Flow of Experience.Binocular rivalry provides a useful situation for studying the relation between the temporal flow of conscious experience and the temporal dynamics of neural activity. After proposing a phenomenological framework for understanding temporal aspects of consciousness, we review experimental research on multistable perception and binocular rivalry, singling out various methodological, theoretical, and empirical aspects of this research relevant to studying the flow of experience. We then review an experimental study from our group explicitly concerned with relating the temporal dynamics of rivalrous experience to the temporal dynamics of cortical activity. Drawing attention to the importance of dealing with ongoing activity and its inherent changing nature at both phenomenological and neurodynamical levels, we argue that the notions of recurrence and variability are pertinent to understanding rivalry in particular and the flow of experience in general.In my reading list | Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
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Among psychologists and vision scientists,binocular rivalry has enjoyed sustainedinterest for decades dating back to the 19thcentury. In recent years, however, rivalry''saudience has expanded to includeneuroscientists who envision rivalry as a tool for exploring the neural concomitants ofconscious visual awareness and perceptualorganization. For rivalry''s potential to berealized, workers using this tool need toknow details of this fascinating phenomenon,and providing those details is the purpose ofthis article. After placing rivalry in ahistorical context, I summarize major findingsconcerning the spatial characteristics and thetemporal dynamics (...)
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| Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: psy.vanderbilt.edu ruccs.rutgers.edu springerlink.com kluweronline.com ingentaconnect.com | Scholar | More..
| | Other links: psy.vanderbilt.edu ruccs.rutgers.edu springerlink.com kluweronline.com ingentaconnect.com | Scholar | More.. The neural basis of binocular rivalry has beenthe subject of vigorous debate. Do discrepantmonocular patterns rival for awareness becauseof neural competition among patternrepresentations or monocular channels? In thisarticle, I briefly review psychophysical andneurophysiological evidence pertaining to boththeories and discuss important new neuroimagingdata which reveal that rivalry is fullyresolved in monocular visual cortex. These newfindings strongly suggest that interocularcompetition mediates binocular rivalry and thatV1 plays an important role in the selection ofconscious visual information. They furthersuggest that rivalry is not a unitaryphenomenon. (...)
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| Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: csbmb.princeton.edu springerlink.com kluweronline.com ingentaconnect.com | Scholar | More..
| | Other links: csbmb.princeton.edu springerlink.com kluweronline.com ingentaconnect.com | Scholar | More.. A midbrain neural basis for the perceptualoscillations of binocular rivalry is suggestedon the basis of fMRI studies of rivalry andinferences from the properties of rivalry thatcannot be explained from the known propertiesof primary visual cortical (V1) neurons. Therivalry switch is proposed to activatehomologous areas of each cerebral hemispherealternately, by means of a bistable oscillatorcircuit that straddles the midline of theventral tegmentum. This bistable oscillatoroperates at the same slow rate that ischaracteristic of perceptual rivalryalternations. Whilst attempting to divert thepresent preoccupation with (...)
From the evolutionary viewpoint, animals need to monitor the surrounding environment and capture salient features, such as motion, for survival. The visual system is highly developed for monitoring a wide area of visual field and capturing such salient features. In humans and primates, there is a wide binocular field, suggesting a necessity of integrating the images from the two eyes. Binocular rivalry [R. Blake, A neural theory of binocular rivalry, Psychol. Rev. 96 (1989) 145–167; R. Blake, N.K. Logothetis, Visual competition, (...)
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| Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: linkinghub.elsevier.com | Scholar | More..
| | Other links: linkinghub.elsevier.com | Scholar | More.. The relationship between brain activity and conscious visual experience is central to our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying perception. Binocular rivalry, where monocular stimuli compete for perceptual dominance, has been previously used to dissociate the constant stimulus from the varying percept. We report here fMRI results from humans experiencing binocular rivalry under a dichoptic stimulation paradigm that consisted of two drifting random dot patterns with different motion coherence. Each pattern had also a different color, which both enhanced rivalry and (...)
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| Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: sciencedirect.com ncbi.nlm.nih.gov linkinghub.elsevier.com | Scholar | More..
| | Other links: sciencedirect.com ncbi.nlm.nih.gov linkinghub.elsevier.com | Scholar | More.. We investigated binocular rivalry in the twocerebral hemispheres of callosotomized(split-brain) observers. We found that rivalryoccurs for complex stimuli in split-brainobservers, and that it is similar in the twohemispheres. This poses difficulties for twotheories of rivalry: (1) that rivalry occursbecause of switching of activity between thetwo hemispheres, and (2) that rivalry iscontrolled by a structure in the rightfrontoparietal cortex. Instead, similar rivalryfrom the two hemispheres is consistent with atheory that its mechanism is low in the visualsystem, at which each hemisphere conducts (...)
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| Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: dare.ubn.kun.nl dare.ubn.kun.nl:8080 ncbi.nlm.nih.gov ingentaconnect.com | Scholar | More..
| | Other links: dare.ubn.kun.nl dare.ubn.kun.nl:8080 ncbi.nlm.nih.gov ingentaconnect.com | Scholar | More.. The term flow refers to a particular type of experience characterized by feelings of fusion with an on-going activity, effortlessness and fluidity. This article concerns the results of an empirical investigation and phenomenological analysis of this type of experience. The analysis yields a distinction between three phenomenological structures, identified as arising in different combinations within concrete experiences of flow. These results are discussed in relation to the theories of Alfred Schutz and Erving Goffman regarding the organization of experience in everyday (...)
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| Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: neuroreport.com ncbi.nlm.nih.gov | Scholar | More..
| | Other links: neuroreport.com ncbi.nlm.nih.gov | Scholar | More.. 
