Temporal Processing in Bistable Perception of the Necker Cube

Perception of ambiguous figures is unstable and alternates repeatedly between possible interpretations. Some approaches to explaining this phenomenon have, so far, assumed low-level bottom-up mechanisms like adaptation and mutual inhibition of underlying neural assemblies. In contrast, less precise top-down approaches assume high-level attentional control mechanisms generalised across sensory modalities. In the current work we focused on specific aspects of the top-down approach. In a first study we used dwell times (periods of transiently stable percepts) and the parameters of dwell time distribution functions to compare the dynamics of perceptual alternations between visual (Necker cube) and auditory ambiguity (verbal transformation effect). In a second study we compared the endogenous alternation dynamics of the Necker cube with parameters from two attention tasks with different regimes of temporal dynamics. The first attention task (d2) is characterised by endogenous self-paced dynamics, similar to th...