This essay critically examines the extent to which binocular rivalry can provide important clues about the neural correlates of conscious visual perception. Our ideas are presented within the framework of four questions about the use of rivalry for this purpose: (i) what constitutes an adequate comparison condition for gauging rivalry's impact on awareness, (ii) how can one distinguish...
When viewing a different stimulus with each eye, we experience the remarkable phenomenon of binocular rivalry: alternations in consciousness between the stimuli [1, 2]. According to a popular theory first proposed in 1901, neurons encoding the two stimuli engage in reciprocal inhibition [3-8] so that those processing one stimulus inhibit those processing the other, yielding consciousness of one...