Adaptive center-surround interactions in human vision revealed during binocular rivalry
Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 17, 2026

How to Create and Use Binocular Rivalry
Published on: November 10, 2010
Chris L E Paffen1, Duje Tadin, Susan F te Pas
1Helmholtz Research Institute, Psychonomics Division, Utrecht University Heidelberglaan 2, The Netherlands. c.paffen@fss.uu.nl
Abstract:
We used binocular rivalry as a psychophysical probe to explore center-surround interactions in orientation, motion and color processing. Addition of the surround matching one of the rival targets dramatically altered rivalry dynamics. For all visual sub-modalities tested, predominance of the high-contrast rival target matched to the surround was greatly reduced-a result that disappeared at low contrast. At low contrast, addition of the surround boosted dominance of orientation and motion targets matched to the surround. This contrast-dependent modulation of center-surround interactions seems to be a general property of the visual system and may reflect an adaptive balance between surround suppression and spatial summation.
Related Concept Videos
Color Vision
Anatomy of the Eyeball
Depth Perception and Spatial Vision
Vision
Perceptual Constancy
Size constancy is the recognition that an object remains the same size, even when its image on the retina changes. For instance, a bus is perceived to be large enough to carry people, even if it looks tiny from...
Visual Agnosia

