Mountains and Valleys: Binocular Rivalry and the Flow of Experience

Binocular rivalry, where conflicting images presented to each eye cause alternating perception, offers a window into how conscious experience unfolds over time. The authors first propose a framework for understanding temporal aspects of consciousness, then review research on multistable perception and binocular rivalry, highlighting methodological and theoretical issues. They describe their own experimental study linking the timing of perceptual switches in rivalry to the timing of cortical brain activity. Emphasizing that both conscious experience and neural activity are inherently dynamic and changing, they argue that concepts of recurrence and variability are key to understanding rivalry and the broader flow of experience.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Binocular rivalry provides a useful situation for studying the relation between the temporal flow of conscious experience and the temporal dynamics of neural activity. After proposing a phenomenological framework for understanding temporal aspects of consciousness, we review experimental research on multistable perception and binocular rivalry, singling out various methodological, theoretical, and empirical aspects of this research relevant to studying the flow of experience. We then review an experimental study from our group explicitly concerned with relating the temporal dynamics of rivalrous experience to the temporal dynamics of cortical activity. Drawing attention to the importance of dealing with ongoing activity and its inherent changing nature at both phenomenological and neurodynamical levels, we argue that the notions of recurrence and variability are pertinent to understanding rivalry in particular and the flow of experience in general.