The effects of categorical and linguistic adaptation on binocular rivalry initial dominance

Binocular rivalry (BR) is a phenomenon in which visual perception alternates between two different monocular stimuli. There has been a long debate regarding its nature, with a special emphasis on whether low- or high-level mechanisms are involved. Prior adaptation to one of the two monocular stimuli is known to affect initial dominance in the subsequent dichoptic presentation. In the present work, we have used three different types of adaptation in order to investigate how each one affects initial dominance during BR. In the first adaptation type, adapting to a stimulus identical to the one used during rivalry has led to its consequent suppression, verifying previous findings. The binocular presentation which we have used excludes the possibility of eye-adaptation, suggesting that it is the specific stimulus that the brain adapts to. In the second adaptation type, we find suppression effects following adaptation to stimuli belonging to the same category (face or house) but are different from the specific ones used in the following BR presentation. In the final adaptation type, in which the words “face” or “house” are used as adaptors, no statistically significant effect was found. These results suggest that perceptual selection can be directly influenced by the prior presentation of visual stimuli different to the ones used during BR, and thus support a higher-level, cognitive influence on the latter.