This is an interesting observation. We had not noticed this pattern, but we agree that there does appear to be a consistent temporal pattern in transition between the dominance states. To our knowledge, such temporal patterns in rivalry have never been specifically investigated. Informal observations by ourselves and others, suggest that the time course of rivalry transitions is often replicated in a highly predictable manner over consecutive trials. This is most striking when the presentation time is brief and only one or two transitions are allowed to occur during each presentation. Something along these lines was hinted at by Leopold et al (2002) in their study of perceptual stabilization. We are unaware of this pattern of temporal order stability being reported in any rivalry study using longer periods of rivalry presentation (analogous to that suggested by our results). Nor are we aware of any model of rivalry that would predict such an effect.


Leopold, D.A., Wilke, M., Maier, A., and Logothetis, N.K. (2002). Stable perception of visually ambiguous patterns. Nature neuroscience 5, 605-609.