Junjie Yan¹, Chencan Qian¹, Peng Zhang¹; ¹Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Conscious perception spontaneously alternates between the two eyes’ images during binocular rivalry. While the neural mechanisms driving the temporal dynamics of binocular rivalry have been extensively studied, how local competitions are synchronized into a spatially coherent perceptual representation remains elusive. In a series of psychophysical experiments, we found that spatial synchronization of local rivalry dynamics is strongly dependent on visual awareness, spatial attention, and eye-based attention, but not sensitive to low-level factors such as stimulus position or cortical distance, thereby implicating a critical role of top-down feedback in synchronizing local competitions. To further investigate the underlying computational mechanisms, we built a hierarchical predictive-coding model and verified that high-level predictive activity is required to synchronize local rivalry across space, but is not necessary for generating local competitions themselves. While high-level switches typically precede those at lower levels, perturbation experiments showed that increasing the synchronization among low-level nodes exerts a stronger bias on subsequent high-level switches, forming a recurrent loop to drive the rivalry dynamics. Together, these results support a recurrent mechanism by which local and global competitions are coordinated to produce a spatially coherent perceptual representation.