The complexity of conscious visual experience: insights from bistable perception paradigms

Our perceptual experience is rich and complex. Yet typical cognitive psychology paradigms reduce it to a few pre-defined discrete categories, such as perceived/not perceived or a value on a Likert scale. In our recent work we challenged this simplified approach by investigating subjective visual experience in its complexity. Using binocular rivalry as an example paradigm widely used in consciousness research, we asked participants about their subjective experiences while viewing binocular rivalry using an open-format questionnaire. We then applied content analysis to classify their descriptions into different percept categories, finding, over all subjects and stimulus types, 20 distinct percept types. In my talk I will present the study and its follow-ups and will discuss the potential implications of its findings for both basic and clinically relevant research.