When the two eyes are presented with incompatible stimuli, the two monocular stimuli are seen alternately in a never-ending cycle. It is now widely accepted that the neural processes underlying this phenomenon, binocular rivalry, are distributed across a number of cortical stages. It is not clear, however, where binocular rivalry is initiated. We performed two experiments whose aim was to clarify this issue. In the first experiment, rivalry was induced, and brief test stimuli were delivered to an eye while its inducing stimulus was either dominant or suppressed. Sensitivity to a test stimulus with features similar to those of the suppressed inducing stimulus was reduced only when the test was presented to the eye whose inducing stimulus was suppressed. This indicates that suppression of a monocular channel is a prerequisite for binocular rivalry suppression. The second experiment showed that to induce rivalry, local interocular stimulus incompatibilities were necessary and that conflicting global percepts were not sufficient. These results suggest that low-level visual processes are required for the initiation of binocular rivalry.

中文翻译：

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抑制双目竞争所需的条件。

当两只眼睛出现不兼容的刺激时，两个单眼刺激会以无休止的循环交替出现。现在，人们普遍认为，这种现象所基于的神经过程，即双眼竞争，分布在许多皮质阶段。但是，尚不清楚在何处发起双目竞争。我们进行了两个实验，目的是弄清楚这个问题。在第一个实验中，竞争被诱导，短暂的测试刺激被传递到眼睛，而其诱导刺激则是主导或被抑制。仅当将测试呈现在其刺激被抑制的眼睛上时，对具有与被抑制的诱导刺激的特征相似的特征的测试刺激的敏感性才降低。这表明抑制单眼通道是抑制双眼竞争的前提。第二个实验表明，要引起竞争，局部眼间刺激的不相容性是必要的，并且相互矛盾的全局感知还不够。这些结果表明，双目竞争的开始需要低水平的视觉过程。