The complexity of human subjective experience during binocular rivalry.
Neuroscience of consciousness January 1, 2025 Cemre Yilmaz, Laura Pabel, Elias Kerschenbauer et al. 2 citations
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.