Functional neuroimaging of binocular rivalry

Binocular rivalry has intrigued researchers for over two centuries, but research into its neural mechanisms was until recently limited to behavioral and animal studies. The availability of functional magnetic resonance imaging since the 1990s has boosted the neuroscientific investigation of binocular rivalry in humans. Functional neuroimaging has revealed an involvement of all levels of the brain’s visual processing hierarchy in rivalry dynamics, including early subcortical and cortical stages, functionally specialized visual areas, and non-sensory frontoparietal regions. Moreover, variants of binocular rivalry have helped to elucidate the neural fate of unconscious information during binocular rivalry suppression. The findings from neuroimaging research are integrated into a comprehensive view on how different processing stages interact to resolve perceptual conflict in the human brain.