Surface organization influences bistable vision.

A priority for the visual system is to construct 3-dimensional surfaces from visual primitives. Information is combined across individual cues to form a robust representation of the external world. Here, it is shown that surface completion relying on multiple visual cues influences relative dominance during binocular rivalry. The shape of a surface determined by 1 nonrivalrous visual cue (disparity, structure-from-motion) alters the dominance patterns of a rivalrous region of the image whose shape is defined by another cue (perspective, texture). The findings indicate that contextual information promotes the perception of the member of the rivalrous pair consistent with a smooth surface representation. The results extend the current description of binocular rivalry as a hierarchical process by implying that cue combination affects image selection during bistable viewing. (Copyright) 2008 APA, all rights reserved.