Competition with and without priority control: linking rivalry to attention through winner-take-all networks with memory

Competition is ubiquitous in perception. For example, items in the visual field compete for processing resources, and attention controls their priority (biased competition). The inevitable ambiguity in the interpretation of sensory signals yields another form of competition: distinct perceptual inte...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 2015-03, Vol.1339 (1), p.138-153
Main Authors: Marx, Svenja, Gruenhage, Gina, Walper, Daniel, Rutishauser, Ueli, Einhäuser, Wolfgang
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
attention
Attention - physiology
binocular rivalry
Blanking
Circuits
Competition
Construction
Dominance
Female
Humans
Joining
Male
Memory - physiology
modeling
Nerve Net - physiology
Networks
Neural Inhibition - physiology
Original
Photic Stimulation - methods
Priorities
psychophysics
vision
Visual Perception - physiology
winner-take-all network
Young Adult
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Summary:Competition is ubiquitous in perception. For example, items in the visual field compete for processing resources, and attention controls their priority (biased competition). The inevitable ambiguity in the interpretation of sensory signals yields another form of competition: distinct perceptual interpretations compete for access to awareness. Rivalry, where two equally likely percepts compete for dominance, explicates the latter form of competition. Building upon the similarity between attention and rivalry, we propose to model rivalry by a generic competitive circuit that is widely used in the attention literature—a winner‐take‐all (WTA) network. Specifically, we show that a network of two coupled WTA circuits replicates three common hallmarks of rivalry: the distribution of dominance durations, their dependence on input strength (“Levelt's propositions”), and the effects of stimulus removal (blanking). This model introduces a form of memory by forming discrete states and explains experimental data better than competitive models of rivalry without memory. This result supports the crucial role of memory in rivalry specifically and in competitive processes in general. Our approach unifies the seemingly distinct phenomena of rivalry, memory, and attention in a single model with competition as the common underlying principle.
ISSN:0077-8923
1749-6632
DOI:10.1111/nyas.12575