Attention and awareness uncoupled in brain imaging experiments
This is bi-stable visual stimuli used for awareness studies. Left diagram shows a classical example, the Necker cube, where the surface depth perception switches over time. On the right, a binocular rivalry stimulus is shown. By putting one grating in one eye and the other grating in the other eye, our percept starts to switch between the two gratings. Interestingly, as in our main stimuli, the unpatterned donut region also takes over the left grating when the right stimulus is perceived. They are ideal and widely used tools to investigate the neural correlate of visual awareness because our percept switches while the physical stimulus remains constant. Credit: MPI for Biological Cybernetics
