Mesoscale cortical mechanisms of perceptual conflict resolution in binocular rivalry

This dataset comprises the source data and accompany code for the publication "Mesoscale cortical mechanisms of perceptual conflict resolution in binocular rivalry". The study addressed how our brain resolves conflicts in sensory input to generate conscious perception using high-resolution 7T fMRI, by investigating column- and layer-specific activity in cortical and subcortical regions in humans during binocular rivalry. Results showed that eye-specific rivalry arises from interocular inhibition between adjacent ocular dominance columns in the superficial layers of the primary visual cortex (V1), but not between ocular layers of the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) of the thalamus. Eye-specific feedback from the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) plays an active role in biasing and synchronizing local competitions in V1 into perceptually coherent representations, even without awareness of the eye-of-origin information. These findings revealed the mesoscale mechanisms of perceptual conflict resolution in humans: local conflicts in sensory input are resolved by inhibitory microcircuits in the sensory cortex, while feedback signals from the parietal attention network bias and integrate local competitions into a unified conscious perception.The dataset contains data to reproduce the main findings of the study. Raw fMRI data can be requested by contacting the corresponding author Peng Zhang (zhangpeng(AT)ibp.ac.cn).Author list of the related article: Chencan Qian, Zihao Zhang, Zhiqiang Chen, Gilles de Hollander, Tomas Knapen, Sheng He, Peng Zhang