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Binocular rivalry is an involuntary alternation in perception. It occurs under conditions where sufficiently dissimilar stimuli are presented to the two eyes and has an experimental history extending for centuries, as summarized in chapter 1. From the late 1960s until the early 1990s, there was general acceptance that rivalry was the result of competition between the eyes, and more particularly between the monocular streams of information coming from the retinal output of the two eyes (summarized in Blake, 1989).

The neuroscience revolution of the 1980s and 1990s meant that new experimental techniques were applied to understanding the mechanism of binocular rivalry. The general finding from experiments in monkeys and humans on how objects are seen is that the complexity of neuronal processing increases along the pipeline of temporal cortical areas (reviewed in Logothetis, 1998a). This is exemplified by the …