A model of binocular rivalry based on competition in IT

Abstract Binocular rivalry is observed when the stimuli presented to both eyes are incongruent and cannot be fused together into a single percept. In such a situation the brain perceives an alternation of the two images, with the mean duration of the dominant perception being a few seconds. We propose a computational model of competition with spiking frequency adaptation in the inferotemporal cortex (IT) that is able to reproduce the experimental distributions of the dominant phase durations. We also include top–down connections from IT to earlier visual areas (V4) that generate the observed perception-modulated response of some neurons in these areas.

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