A reservoir model of respiration-induced perceptual alternation in binocular rivalry
bioRxiv – February 06, 2025
Source: medRxiv/bioRxiv/arXiv
Summary
Did you know that your breathing can influence what you see? This study reveals that perceptual shifts in binocular rivalry are linked to respiratory phases. Using a neural network model, researchers found that a brain chemical, norepinephrine, helps facilitate these visual changes, regardless of its excitatory or inhibitory effects.
Abstract
Perceptual alternation in human binocular rivalry is more likely to occur during certain respiratory phases. In this paper, we show that the respiration dependence of perceptual alternations can be reproduced by a randomly connected recurrent neural network coupled with respiration relevant information via a neuromodulator of norepinephrine (NA). We considered two models of NA modulations; NA increases or decreases the nonlinearity of the activation function of neurons, and we found that the shape of the likelihood function of perceptual alternation depends only on respiratory phase, regardless of whether NA increases or decreases neural nonlinearity. Our results suggest that periodic neuromodulation facilitates the switching of competing neural states in specific phases and that this effect is independent of the excitatory or inhibitory effect of NA.