The spatiotemporal dynamics of binocular rivalry: evidence for increased top-down flow prior to a perceptual switch

Abstract

According to most theories, perceptual switching during binocular rivalry is caused by competition between the neural rep-resentations of the two input images. It remains unclear whether competition is resolved already at the early stages of vis-ual processing and that information about the dominant percept is then fed forward to more high-level areas or whether competition is first resolved in high-level areas and then fed back to lower levels. This study aimed to dissociate between these theories by investigating the direction of information flow prior to a perceptual switch, using Granger causality on classifier output originating from occipital, temporal, parietal and frontal regions of interest. The results point toward increased top-down information flow between temporal and occipital areas before a switch in dominance. These findings do not support a low-level account of binocular rivalry but are in line with high-level and hybrid explanations.