Stoner Gene R, Mitchell Jude F, Fallah Mazyar, Reynolds John H
Systems Neurobiology Laboratory, The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, 10010 North Torrey Pines Road, La Jolla, CA 92037-1099, USA.
Prog Brain Res. 2005;149:227-34. doi: 10.1016/S0079-6123(05)49016-0.
Visuomotor processing is selective - only a small subset of stimuli that impinge on the retinae reach perceptual awareness and/or elicit behavioral responses. Both binocular rivalry and attention involve visual selection, but affect perception quite differently. During rivalry, awareness alternates between different stimuli presented to the two eyes. In contrast, attending to one of the two stimuli impairs discrimination of the ignored stimulus, but without causing it to perceptually disappear. We review experiments demonstrating that, despite their phenomenological differences, attention and rivalry depend upon shared competitive selection mechanisms. These experiments, moreover, reveal stimulus selection that is surface-based and requires coordination between the different neuronal populations that respond as a surface changes its attributes (type of motion) over time. This surface-based selection, in turn biases interocular competition, favoring the eye whose image is consistent with the selected surface. The review ends with speculation about the role of the thalamus in mediating this dynamic coordination, as well as thoughts about what underlies the differences in the phenomenology of selective attention and rivalry.
视觉运动处理具有选择性——只有一小部分作用于视网膜的刺激能够达到感知觉意识和/或引发行为反应。双眼竞争和注意力都涉及视觉选择，但对感知的影响却大不相同。在竞争过程中，意识在呈现给双眼的不同刺激之间交替。相比之下，关注两个刺激中的一个会损害对被忽略刺激的辨别，但不会使其在感知上消失。我们回顾了一些实验，这些实验表明，尽管注意力和竞争在现象学上存在差异，但它们依赖于共同的竞争性选择机制。此外，这些实验揭示了基于表面的刺激选择，并且需要随着表面属性（运动类型）随时间变化而做出反应的不同神经元群体之间的协调。这种基于表面的选择反过来会偏向眼间竞争，有利于其图像与所选表面一致的那只眼睛。综述最后推测了丘脑在介导这种动态协调中的作用，以及关于选择性注意力和竞争现象学差异背后原因的思考。
