MInDSwitches

Perceiving is essentially an active, dynamic decision process, whereby our brain has to deal with multiple uncertain and often ambiguous elements from the sensory input to make sense of the world. This is particularly evident with multistable, ambiguous visual stimuli, where multiple interpretations (percepts) are possible for a single physical stimulus. In this condition, human observers spontaneously alternate between the possible percepts at unpredictable times. This phenomenon has intrigued brain scientists and philosophers for decades, as it touches upon the very definition of consciousness, but also because it offers an challenging benchmark for models of decision-making.
Another important property of human visual processing is that it is indissolubly linked to the incessant eye movements that allow to select and optimize the high-resolution analysis of the regions of interest: visual perception influences and is influenced by eye movements.
The MInDSwitches projects builds on preliminary findings suggesting that tracking eye movements are a reliable time-continuous readout of perceptual decision dynamics while observing multistable moving stimuli.
Hence we will use multiple techniques (visual psychophysics, eye tracking, EEG) with innovative experimental designs, as well as computational modelling, to achieve a comprehensive understanding of probabilistic inference for multistable perception. Importantly the involvement of the clinical partner in Lille and of the international partner in Edinburgh will allow us to extend the scopus of this project beyond the population of healthy participants. We will validate specific model predictions about dysfunctions in the inferential process with the data collected in psychiatric patients (mainly schizophrenics) and in large groups of participants with variable scores in autistic personality traits (and other kinds of neuro-atypic traits).