Review
Multistable phenomena: changing views in perception

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Abstract

Traditional explanations of multistable visual phenomena (e.g. ambiguous figures, perceptual rivalry) suggest that the basis for spontaneous reversals in perception lies in antagonistic connectivity within the visual system. In this review, we suggest an alternative, albeit speculative, explanation for visual multistability – that spontaneous alternations reflect responses to active, programmed events initiated by brain areas that integrate sensory and non-sensory information to coordinate a diversity of behaviors. Much evidence suggests that perceptual reversals are themselves more closely related to the expression of a behavior than to passive sensory responses: (1) they are initiated spontaneously, often voluntarily, and are influenced by subjective variables such as attention and mood; (2) the alternation process is greatly facilitated with practice and compromised by lesions in non-visual cortical areas; (3) the alternation process has temporal dynamics similar to those of spontaneously initiated behaviors; (4) functional imaging reveals that brain areas associated with a variety of cognitive behaviors are specifically activated when vision becomes unstable. In this scheme, reorganizations of activity throughout the visual cortex, concurrent with perceptual reversals, are initiated by higher, largely non-sensory brain centers. Such direct intervention in the processing of the sensory input by brain structures associated with planning and motor programming might serve an important role in perceptual organization, particularly in aspects related to selective attention.

Section snippets

Activity in the brain during multistable vision

A number of recent neurophysiological and imaging experiments in monkeys and humans, respectively, have shed light on cortical activity during multistable perception. Most of these studies have used binocular rivalry, a psychophysical paradigm in which perception can be destabilized simply by showing sufficiently dissimilar images to the two eyes (see Fig. 1D; for reviews see 10, 12). During rivalry, perception is wholly dominated by one pattern while that presented to the other eye is rendered

Temporal dynamics

A strong line of evidence in support of the present hypothesis is the very similar temporal dynamics for perceptual reversals and a variety of spontaneously generated visuomotor behaviors. For example, periods of dominance and suppression in ambiguous vision are characterized by sequential stochastic independence8, 22, 23, 24. This empirical observation has presented difficulties for reciprocal-inhibition models of bistable perception in which fatigue initiates perceptual reversals, for such

Why might perception alternate?

The view of multistable perception presented here invites the question: Why does the brain continually reorganize an ambiguous sensory input? Although an observer can have significant voluntary control over dominance and suppression (as discussed above), it is clear that this influence is not the driving force for alternation, which continues in the absence of any particular intent on the part of the observer and can never be stopped entirely. By and large, any events leading to perceptual

Conclusions

The hypothesis presented in this article can be restated as follows: the complex analysis of sensory information ultimately leading to visual perception is continually steered and modified by sequences of planned interventions emerging from areas lying outside the visual system. Such intervention is most apparent when perception is unstable, as in ambiguous vision, but is likely to be a general property of active perception that is closely related to selective attention. If the brain's planning

Outstanding questions

  • •

    What is the temporal relationship between neural responses in different cortical areas during subjective transitions? Would activity changes in the frontoparietal areas precede those in the extrastriate visual cortex as suggested by the present hypothesis?

  • •

    What is the role of intra- and inter-areal synchrony between populations of neurons in multistable perception? Might competing neural stimulus representations alternate in their degree of coherence during the perceptual changes?

  • •

    What is the

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Drs Francis Crick and Christof Koch for useful comments on the manuscript, and Dr Jochen Braun for finding it interesting.

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