Yilmaz Cemre, Pabel Laura, Kerschenbauer Elias, Ischebeck Anja, Sipatchin Alexandra, Bartels Andreas, Zaretskaya Natalia
Department of Psychology, University of Graz, Graz, ST 8010, Austria.
BioTechMed-Graz, Graz, ST 8010, Austria.
Neurosci Conscious. 2025 Feb 28;2025(1):niaf004. doi: 10.1093/nc/niaf004. eCollection 2025.
Our subjective experience of the sensory information is rich and complex. Yet, typical cognitive and perception psychology paradigms reduce it to a few predefined discrete categories, like yes/no answers or the Likert scales. In the current study, we examined the complexity of subjective visual experience during binocular rivalry, a major experimental paradigm used to study conscious visual perception and its neural mechanisms. Binocular rivalry occurs when the two eyes are presented with two different images that cannot be fused into a uniform percept. As a result, the conscious perception alternates between the two images with brief transition phases in between. Fifty-two subjects viewed binocular rivalry produced by pairs of stimuli with different visual information (images, orthogonal gratings, or moving dots). After each rivalry period, they indicated how many different transition types they perceived and described their perception of each transition type. Using content analysis, we identified 20 unique categories over all subjects, sessions, and stimuli. On average, participants reported 2-3 unique transition categories for each visual stimulus combination. The categories were consistent for each observer over time but varied across participants and stimulus content. Our results show that perceptual transitions during binocular rivalry appear in different forms and depend on the specific visual stimulus content that induces rivalry. Our findings have implications for neuroimaging studies of binocular rivalry, which may yield different results depending on the exact experience of transitions. They also demonstrate how the complexity of subjective visual experience may be underestimated in traditional perception paradigms.
我们对感官信息的主观体验丰富而复杂。然而，典型的认知和感知心理学范式将其简化为少数几个预定义的离散类别，如“是/否”答案或李克特量表。在当前的研究中，我们研究了双眼竞争期间主观视觉体验的复杂性，双眼竞争是一种用于研究有意识视觉感知及其神经机制的主要实验范式。当两只眼睛看到两个无法融合成一个统一感知的不同图像时，就会发生双眼竞争。结果，有意识的感知在两个图像之间交替，中间有短暂的过渡阶段。52名受试者观看了由具有不同视觉信息的刺激对（图像、正交光栅或移动点）产生的双眼竞争。在每个竞争期之后，他们指出自己感知到了多少种不同的过渡类型，并描述了对每种过渡类型的感知。通过内容分析，我们在所有受试者、实验环节和刺激中确定了20个独特的类别。平均而言，参与者为每种视觉刺激组合报告2至3种独特的过渡类别。这些类别对每个观察者来说随时间是一致的，但在不同参与者和刺激内容之间有所不同。我们的结果表明，双眼竞争期间的感知过渡以不同形式出现，并取决于引发竞争的特定视觉刺激内容。我们的发现对双眼竞争的神经成像研究具有启示意义，根据过渡的具体体验，这些研究可能会产生不同的结果。它们还表明，在传统感知范式中，主观视觉体验的复杂性可能被低估了。
