Selective attention to stimulus features modulates interocular suppression

Psychological and neurophysiological studies have shown that attention modulates various sorts of perceptual processing. Here, we report that attention affects the perceptual dominance of binocular rivalry. Experiments using a dichoptic masking paradigm revealed that when an observer was attending to one of the two orientations of the elements of a monocular texture, a texture briefly presented to the opposite eye suppressed the perception of the elements with the attended orientation, while the elements with the orientation which was ignored sustained their dominance. Moreover, subsequent experiments indicated that the suppression depended on the orientation of the texture elements constituting the mask, but was independent of their locations. These results suggest that attention to specific features modulates interocular suppression in a mode which is different from that found in a previous study [Ooi and He, 1999 Perception 28 551-574].