Adaptation to invisible gratings and the site of binocular rivalry suppression

Abstract

THE visual system can be described usefully as a hierarchical series of functional stages, the initial stage being physical impingement of the stimulus and the terminal stage being visual perception. Psychophysical investigations typically provide rigorous specification of the first and last stages in the sequence, but a more complete explanation clearly must include information about intermediate stages as well. At present, however, very few techniques are available for analysing inferentially the intermediate stages¹. By incorporating two separate phenomena, binocular rivalry and visual aftereffects, into one paradigm, we describe here another technique for inferential analysis of the stages leading to vision. This technique indicates the sequence of stages underlying both phenomena.