{"ID":2852556,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.17154","arxiv_id":"2510.17154","title":"A Minimal Quantitative Model of Perceptual Suppression and Breakthrough in Visual Rivalry","abstract":"When conflicting images are presented to either eye, binocular fusion is disrupted. Rather than experiencing a blend of both percepts, often only one eye's image is experienced, whilst the other is suppressed from awareness. Importantly, suppression is transient - the two rival images compete for dominance, with stochastic switches between mutually exclusive percepts occurring every few seconds with law-like regularity. From the perspective of dynamical systems theory, visual rivalry offers an experimentally tractable window into the dynamical mechanisms governing perceptual awareness. In a recently developed visual rivalry paradigm - tracking continuous flash suppression (tCFS) - it was shown that the transition between awareness and suppression is hysteretic, with a higher contrast threshold required for a stimulus to breakthrough suppression into awareness than to be suppressed from awareness. Here, we present an analytically-tractable model of visual rivalry that quantitatively explains the hysteretic transition between periods of awareness and suppression in tCFS. Grounded in the theory of neural dynamics, we derive closed-form expressions for the duration of perceptual dominance and suppression, and for the degree of hysteresis (i.e. the depth of perceptual suppression), as a function of model parameters. Finally, our model yields a series of novel behavioural predictions, the first of which - distributions of dominance and suppression durations during tCFS should be approximately equal - we empirically validate in human psychophysical data.","short_abstract":"When conflicting images are presented to either eye, binocular fusion is disrupted. Rather than experiencing a blend of both percepts, often only one eye's image is experienced, whilst the other is suppressed from awareness. Importantly, suppression is transient - the two rival images compete for dominance, with stocha...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.17154","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.17154v2","authors":"[\"Christopher J. Whyte\",\"Hugh R. Wilson\",\"Shay Tobin\",\"Brandon R. Munn\",\"Shervin Safavi\",\"Eli J. Muller\",\"Jayson Jeganathan\",\"Matt Davidson\",\"James M. Shine\",\"David Alais\"]","published":"2025-10-20T04:55:46Z","proceeding":"q-bio.NC","tasks":"[\"q-bio.NC\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}