The impact of fluctuations on the recognition of ambiguous patterns

The recognition of ambiguous patterns by humans is modelled by coupled differential equations which describe the formation of percepts by means of order parameters which in turn are determined by the saturation of attention parameters. We study the impact of fluctuations on the attention parameters and thus indirectly on the recognition of ambiguous patterns. Excellent agreement with psychophysical experimental results by Price on the transient behaviour of switching times and by Borsellino et al. on the distribution function of switching times as function of the size of the visual field is obtained. Our model allows us to deal also with the shift of width and position of the distribution function with respect to slow and fast observers in the sense of Borsellino.