Binocular Rivalry
Binocular rivalry occurs when non-resolving (rivalrous) images are presented to each eye (Lansing 1964). They rival for perceptual dominance, that is, a visual image of one eye suppresses the other. Dominance of each image has been shown to last between 2500-5500 ms, this time is consistent within subjects but differs between subjects (Tong 1998). There are however many factors that can affect the rivalry. These are, for example, image size that can affect how smoothly the rivalry occurs; larger images tend to have smoother transitions between dominance. Also, highly familiar images such as faces or words can emerge from suppression more quickly than others (Jiang 2006, in Tong 2006). fMRI studies have successfully identified such images since representations of houses, for example, are processed in a different part of the brain than are faces (Tong 1998).

 

Goal
The goal of this experiment was to build a non-rivalrous model to use for classification of image dominance during binocular rivalry. This was done by presenting the images one by one. Three dimensions were chosen for the stimuli; object (house/face), color (red/green) and size (large/small). The last dimension was added in hope to improve classification.