BINOCULAR RIVALRY OF MOTION

Abstract

Interocular suppression results when one stimulus (mask) is made more salient in order to suppress from awareness the other stimulus (target) presented to the other eye. In the first series of studies, we investigated whether matching motion characteristics of a dynamic mask to those of a moving target would result in better interocular suppression. We show that feature-selective suppression did not apply to motion features such as movement pattern and speed. Instead, a faster target was detected faster regardless of the speed of the mask, while a strikingly low speed of the mask resulted in most effective suppression regardless of the speed of the target. In the second series of studies, we focused on the competition between stimuli similar in strength, i.e., a classical binocular rivalry scenario. We found that static or slow stimuli dominated the center, while fast motion persisted along the borders of the stimulus. The central dominance of the static/slow field scaled with the stimulus size, was time-locked to the onset of the static stimulus, and lasted for one second. Furthermore, we established that this effect has implications for interocular masking. Finally, this work has implications for the neural mechanisms responsible for conscious awareness.