Functional asymmetries of the human visual system as revealed by binocular rivalry and binocular brightness matching

Two techniques, a binocular rivalry task and a binocular brightness matching task, were designed to yield indices of asymmetry (relative dominance weights) for the two eyes, the crossed and uncrossed visual pathways, and the two cerebral hemispheres. Twenty subjects with normal vision were run on all conditions. Intercorrelations of the dominance weights obtained by the two methods showed no relationship between the two methods, but produced three hypotheses about visual functioning: (1) the left hemisphere appears more dominant for rivalry; (2) the right hemisphere appears more dominant for brightness matching; (3) the uncrossed visual pathways are dominant over the crossed pathways in the binocular rivalry task.