University of Plymouth, Cognition Institute and School of Psychology, Plymouth, PL4 8AA, UK.
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology, Research Centre of Natural Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, H-1117, Budapest, Magyartudósok körútja 2, Hungary.
Sci Rep. 2018 May 8;8(1):7106. doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-25587-2.
The dynamics of perceptual bistability, the phenomenon in which perception switches between different interpretations of an unchanging stimulus, are characterised by very similar properties across a wide range of qualitatively different paradigms. This suggests that perceptual switching may be triggered by some common source. However, it is also possible that perceptual switching may arise from a distributed system, whose components vary according to the specifics of the perceptual experiences involved. Here we used a visual and an auditory task to determine whether individuals show cross-modal commonalities in perceptual switching. We found that individual perceptual switching rates were significantly correlated across modalities. We then asked whether perceptual switching arises from some central (modality-) task-independent process or from a more distributed task-specific system. We found that a log-normal distribution best explained the distribution of perceptual phases in both modalities, suggestive of a combined set of independent processes causing perceptual switching. Modality- and/or task-dependent differences in these distributions, and lack of correlation with the modality-independent central factors tested (ego-resiliency, creativity, and executive function), also point towards perceptual switching arising from a distributed system of similar but independent processes.
知觉双稳态的动力学，即感知在不变刺激的不同解释之间切换的现象，在广泛的定性不同的范式中具有非常相似的特征。这表明知觉切换可能是由一些共同的来源触发的。然而，也有可能知觉切换可能来自分布式系统，其组件根据所涉及的知觉体验的具体情况而有所不同。在这里，我们使用视觉和听觉任务来确定个体在知觉切换中是否表现出跨模态的共性。我们发现个体的知觉切换率在模态之间存在显著相关性。然后我们问知觉切换是来自于某种中央（模态无关）的过程还是来自于更分布式的特定于任务的系统。我们发现对数正态分布最能解释两种模态中的知觉相位分布，这表明一组独立的过程共同导致了知觉切换。这些分布与所测试的模态无关的中央因素（自我弹性、创造力和执行功能）之间的模态和/或任务差异，以及缺乏相关性，也表明知觉切换来自于类似但独立的过程的分布式系统。
