“Mesoscale cortical mechanisms of perceptual conflict resolution in binocular rivalry”.

Chencan Qian, Zihao Zhang, Zhiqiang Chen, Gilles de Hollander, Tomas Knapen, Sheng He, Peng Zhang

Abstract How does the human brain resolve conflicts in sensory input to generate conscious perception? Using high-resolution 7 T functional MRI, we investigated column- and layer-specific activity in cortical and subcortical regions during binocular rivalry. Eye-specific rivalry arose from interocular inhibition between adjacent ocular dominance columns in superficial primary visual cortex, but not between ocular layers in the lateral geniculate nucleus. Eye-specific feedback from intraparietal sulcus actively biased and synchronized local competitions in primary visual cortex into coherent perceptual representations, even without awareness of eye-of-origin information. These findings identify mesoscale mechanisms of perceptual conflict resolution in humans: local conflicts are resolved by inhibitory sensory-cortical microcircuits, while parietal feedback biases and integrates local competition into unified conscious perception.