Abstract

Both the eye of origin and the images themselves have been found to rival during binocular rivalry. We
presented traditional binocular rivalry stimuli (face to one eye, house to the other) and Diaz-Caneja stimuli
(half of each image to each eye) centrally to both a split-brain participant and a control group. With
traditional rivalry stimuli both the split-brain participant and age-matched controls perceived more
coherent percepts (synchronised across the hemifields) than non-synchrony, but our split-brain participant
perceived more non-synchrony than our controls. For rival stimuli in the Diaz-Caneja presentation
condition, object rivalry gave way to eye rivalry with all participants reporting more non-synchrony than
coherent percepts. We have shown that splitting the stimuli across the hemifields between the eyes leads
to greater eye than object rivalry, but that when traditional rival stimuli are split as the result of the severed
corpus callosum, traditional rivalry persists but to a lesser extent than in the intact brain. These
results suggest that communication between the early visual areas is not essential for synchrony in traditional
rivalry stimuli, and that other routes for interhemispheric interactions such as subcortical connections
may mediate rivalry in a traditional binocular rivalry condition.