Reversal negativity and bistable stimuli: Attention, awareness, or something else?

: Intaite M, Koivisto M, Ruksenas O, Revonsuo A

Publisher: ACADEMIC PRESS INC ELSEVIER SCIENCE

: 2010

: Brain and Cognition

: BRAIN AND COGNITION

: BRAIN COGNITION

: 1

: 74

: 1

: 24

: 34

: 11

: 0278-2626

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandc.2010.06.002

Ambiguous (or bistable) figures are visual stimuli that have two mutually exclusive perceptual interpretations that spontaneously alternate with each other. Perceptual reversals, as compared with non-reversals, typically elicit a negative difference called reversal negativity (RN), peaking around 250 ms from stimulus onset. The cognitive interpretation of RN remains unclear: it may reflect either bottom-up processes, attentional processes that select between the alternative views of the stimulus, or it may reflect the change in the contents of subjective awareness. In the present study, event-related potentials in response to endogenous unilateral and bilateral reversals of two Necker lattices were compared with exogenously induced reversals of unambiguous lattices. The RN neither resembled the attention-related N2pc response, nor did it correlate with the content of subjective visual awareness. Thus, we conclude that RN is a non-attentional ERP correlate of the changes in the perceptual configuration of the presented object. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.