Ooi T L, He Z J
Department of Biomedical Sciences, Southern College of Optometry, Memphis, IN 38104, USA.
Perception. 1999;28(5):551-74. doi: 10.1068/p2923.
When the right eye and the left eye view dissimilar scenes, the observer does not experience a stable superimposed percept of the images presented to the two eyes, but instead perceives an alternation between the images seen by each eye. A critical question confronting this robust and intriguing phenomenon of binocular rivalry is how the visual system selects the image to be perceived (dominant). The current main-stream literature emphasizes a bottom-up explanation in which the rivalry stimulus with the higher contour strength has the advantage, and becomes dominant in rivalry. Nevertheless, some workers in the past have favored an attention-selection explanation for binocular rivalry. We investigated the role of attention in binocular rivalry by employing novel psychophysical paradigms which capitalized on several established phenomena (e.g. the Cheshire Cat effect, attention cueing, pop-out effect). Our results revealed two major aspects of attention modulation in binocular rivalry. We found that a dominant image is less likely to be suppressed when voluntary attention is directed to it. This suggests the role of voluntary attention in retaining the dominant image in visual awareness. Second, a rivalry stimulus is more likely to become dominant if accompanied by a pop-out cue (in the same eye and proximity). Since a pop-out cue attracts involuntary attention to its location/eye, this result suggests that cue-mediated involuntary attention can promote the ability of a rivalry stimulus to reach visual awareness.
当右眼和左眼观看不同的场景时，观察者并不会体验到呈现给两只眼睛的图像稳定叠加的感知，而是会感知到每只眼睛所看到的图像之间的交替。这种双眼竞争的强大且有趣的现象面临的一个关键问题是视觉系统如何选择要被感知的图像（占主导地位的图像）。当前的主流文献强调一种自下而上的解释，即具有更高轮廓强度的竞争刺激具有优势，并在竞争中占主导地位。然而，过去一些研究人员支持用注意力选择来解释双眼竞争。我们通过采用利用了几种既定现象（如柴郡猫效应、注意力提示、弹出效应）的新颖心理物理学范式来研究注意力在双眼竞争中的作用。我们的结果揭示了双眼竞争中注意力调制的两个主要方面。我们发现，当自愿注意力指向占主导地位的图像时，它被抑制的可能性较小。这表明自愿注意力在将占主导地位的图像保留在视觉意识中的作用。其次，如果竞争刺激伴随着弹出提示（在同一只眼睛且位置相近）出现，那么它更有可能占主导地位。由于弹出提示会将非自愿注意力吸引到其位置/眼睛上，这一结果表明提示介导的非自愿注意力可以促进竞争刺激进入视觉意识的能力。
