Aspects of monocular rivalry

What we see may often be interpreted in several ways. Under such conditions, our visual system seems to alternate spontaneously between the various possible interpretations: sometimes one percept will be experienced and sometimes another. The present thesis is concerned with a particular form of perceptual instability known as 'monocular rivalry'. It is argued that both the extent to which one percept dominates over another, and the rate at which such changes occur, may be best understood in terms of basic physiological processes. If this is accepted, it appears that perceptual alternations may provide a useful alternative method of investigating the processes underlying pattern analysis in the human visual system. The present experiments were not designed to investigate the 1 nature of the mechanism underlying perceptual alternations. It is argued nevertheless that taken in conjunction with previous findings, they are most'satisfactorially understood in terms of a 'cyclic decision' model (Vickers, 1972). Although the present findings are of primary interest in that they appear to resolve certain discrepancies and to suggest a correlation between areas often regarded as disparate, it is suggested that the phenomena of monocular rivalry may, for several reasons, be particularly appropriate for testing more general issues in this area.