Lee Sang-Hun, Blake Randolph
Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.
J Vis. 2002;2(9):618-26. doi: 10.1167/2.9.4.
During binocular rivalry, one of two incompatible monocular stimuli is erased from perceptual awareness for seconds at a time. To examine whether this "rivalry suppression" occurs in V1, we measured functional magnetic resonance imaging activity during binocular rivalry and compared it with those in the two reference conditions: one representing complete suppression and the other representing no suppression. We found that the amplitude of V1 activity during rivalry fell midway between those in the two reference conditions; the amount of V1 activity associated with the nondominant pattern was reduced by 48% to 77% during rivalry. The same pattern of results was obtained with meaningful rival targets (i.e., a human face and a house). In this work, using a different experimental protocol, we confirmed the findings of earlier imaging studies that neuronal events associated with binocular rivalry occur as early as V1. Furthermore, our findings extend those earlier findings by demonstrating robust neural suppression during binocular rivalry regardless of the stimulus complexity of the rivaling targets.
在双眼竞争期间，两个不相容的单眼刺激中的一个会一次从感知觉中消失数秒。为了研究这种“竞争抑制”是否发生在初级视皮层（V1），我们在双眼竞争期间测量了功能磁共振成像活动，并将其与两种参考条件下的活动进行比较：一种代表完全抑制，另一种代表无抑制。我们发现，竞争期间V1活动的幅度落在两种参考条件下活动幅度的中间位置；在竞争期间，与非主导模式相关的V1活动量减少了48%至77%。对于有意义的竞争目标（即一张人脸和一座房子），也获得了相同的结果模式。在这项研究中，我们使用了不同的实验方案，证实了早期成像研究的结果，即与双眼竞争相关的神经元活动早在V1就已出现。此外，我们的研究结果扩展了那些早期发现，表明无论竞争目标的刺激复杂性如何，在双眼竞争期间都存在强大的神经抑制。
