A Minimal Quantitative Model of Perceptual Suppression and Breakthrough in Visual Rivalry

Christopher J. Whyte; Hugh R. Wilson; Shay Tobin; Brandon R. Munn; Shervin Safavi; Eli J. Muller; Jayson Jeganathan; Matt Davidson; James M. Shine; David Alais

arXiv · 2510.17154

A Minimal Quantitative Model of Perceptual Suppression and Breakthrough in Visual Rivalry

Christopher J. Whyte·Hugh R. Wilson·Shay Tobin·Brandon R. Munn·Shervin Safavi·Eli J. Muller·Jayson Jeganathan·Matt Davidson·James M. Shine·David Alais

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Abstract

When conflicting images are presented to either eye, binocular fusion is disrupted. Rather than experiencing a blend of both percepts, often only one eye's image is experienced, whilst the other is suppressed from awareness. Importantly, suppression is transient - the two rival images compete for dominance, with stochastic switches between mutually exclusive percepts occurring every few seconds with law-like regularity. From the perspective of dynamical systems theory, visual rivalry offers an experimentally tractable window into the dynamical mechanisms governing perceptual awareness. In a recently developed visual rivalry paradigm - tracking continuous flash suppression (tCFS) - it was shown that the transition between awareness and suppression is hysteretic, with a higher contrast threshold required for a stimulus to breakthrough suppression into awareness than to be suppressed from awareness. Here, we present an analytically-tractable model of visual rivalry that quantitatively explains the hysteretic transition between periods of awareness and suppression in tCFS. Grounded in the theory of neural dynamics, we derive closed-form expressions for the duration of perceptual dominance and suppression, and for the degree of hysteresis (i.e. the depth of perceptual suppression), as a function of model parameters. Finally, our model yields a series of novel behavioural predictions, the first of which - distributions of dominance and suppression durations during tCFS should be approximately equal - we empirically validate in human psychophysical data.

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Christopher J. Whyte, Hugh R. Wilson, Shay Tobin, Brandon R. Munn, Shervin Safavi, Eli J. Muller, Jayson Jeganathan, Matt Davidson, James M. Shine, David Alais. 2025-10-24. A Minimal Quantitative Model of Perceptual Suppression and Breakthrough in Visual Rivalry. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.17154

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