de Graaf Tom Alexander, van Ee Raymond, Croonenberg Dennis, Klink Peter Christiaan, Sack Alexander Thomas
Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Maastricht University, Maastricht, the NetherlandsMaastricht Brain Imaging Center, Maastricht, the Netherlands.
Biophysics, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the NetherlandsBrain, Body & Behavior, Philips Research, Eindhoven, the NetherlandsLaboratory Experimental Psychology, University Leuven, Leuven,
J Vis. 2017 Jan 1;17(1):2. doi: 10.1167/17.1.2.
Various paradigms can make visual stimuli disappear from awareness, but they often involve stimuli that are either relatively weak, competing with other salient inputs, and/or presented for a prolonged period of time. Here we explore a phenomenon that involves controlled perceptual disappearance of a peripheral visual stimulus without these limitations. It occurs when one eye's stimulus is abruptly removed during a binocular rivalry situation. This manipulation renders the remaining stimulus, which is still being presented to the other eye, invisible for up to several seconds. Our results suggest that this perceptual disappearance depends on a visual offset-transient that promotes dominance of the eye in which it occurs regardless of whether the eye is dominant or suppressed at the moment of the transient event. Using computational modeling, we demonstrate that standard rivalry mechanisms of interocular inhibition can indeed be complemented by a hypothesized transient-driven gating mechanism to explain the phenomenon. In essence, such a system suggests that visual awareness is dominated by the eye that receives transients and "sticks with" this eye-based dominance for some time in the absence of further transient events. We refer to this phenomenon as the "disrupted rivalry effect" and suggest that it is a potentially powerful paradigm for the study of cortical suppression mechanisms and the neural correlates of visual awareness.
多种范式可使视觉刺激从意识中消失，但它们通常涉及相对较弱、与其他显著输入相互竞争和/或呈现较长时间的刺激。在此，我们探究一种现象，该现象涉及周边视觉刺激在无这些限制情况下的可控性感知消失。当在双眼竞争情境中突然移除一只眼睛的刺激时，就会出现这种现象。这种操作会使仍呈现给另一只眼睛的剩余刺激在长达数秒的时间内不可见。我们的结果表明，这种感知消失取决于一种视觉偏移瞬变，它会促进出现该瞬变的眼睛的优势地位，无论该眼睛在瞬变事件发生时是处于优势还是被抑制状态。通过计算建模，我们证明双眼抑制的标准竞争机制确实可以由一种假设的瞬变驱动门控机制来补充，以解释这一现象。本质上，这样一个系统表明视觉意识由接收瞬变的眼睛主导，并在没有进一步瞬变事件的情况下，基于该眼睛的优势地位持续一段时间。我们将这种现象称为“干扰竞争效应”，并认为它是研究皮层抑制机制和视觉意识神经关联的一种潜在有力范式。
