Perceptual-Motor Integration

Voluntarily selected visual 3D percepts described by neural population codes

Co-ordinator: R. van Ee
Investigator: L.C.J. van Dam
Period: 2002 / 2006
Collaboration:  
Funding: NWO
Description:  

To study voluntary control in conscious perception we exposed the visual system to an ambiguous stimulus that creates two states in neural processing that are governed by bi-stable perception rather than by the stimulus. In our paradigm observers estimated the orientation of a grid in 3D space. For specific combinations of monocular- and binocular-specified orientations observers were able to select either a monocular- or binocular-dominated percept and were able to flip at will between the two percepts in a well-controlled way. The perceived grid orientations were found to be well-described by a neural-population-code model in which both monocular and binocular signals contribute to both percepts.