The effects of inattention on binocular rivalry between complex images: Preliminary results

Abstract

Whether consciousness depends on attention is a significant question in consciousness research. Consciousness is often studied using binocular rivalry: images causing perceptual fluctuations during invariant physical stimulation. The role that attention plays in this phenomenon was debated. On one hand, the neural competition underlying rivalry appears to resolve in the preattentive stages of visual processing (Tong 1998, Tong 2001, Meng 2004). However, diverting attention has been shown to disrupt rivalry (Zhang 2011, Lee 2007, Brascamp 2012). Analysis addressing the main hypothesis remains in future work, but initial analysis revealed several noteworthy findings. Namely, linear discriminant analysis decoded face and house categories above chance from a low frequency band of EEG data during rivalry.