Fig. 2: Experimental paradigms.

A Eye dominance testing via breakage of Continuous Flash Suppression (b-CFS). A left- or right-pointing arrow is presented in either the left or right eye, positioned above, at, or below the fixation marker. The contrast of the arrows linearly increases over 10 s, while the Mondrians’ contrast linearly decreases. Mondrians alternate at 10 Hz. B Backward masking. Target stimuli (scrambled and non-scrambled images, or categorical images) were shown for 16 ms, followed by a masking Mondrian for 250 ms. A gray background is displayed between the target stimulus and the Mondrian for a variable duration to adjust the suppressive strength. After the Mondrian, patients had 1500 ms to verbally report their percept. Categorical stimuli were published in Popivanov, I. D., Jastorff, J., Vanduffel, W. & Vogels, R. Stimulus representations in body-selective regions of the macaque cortex assessed with event-related fMRI. Neuroimage 63, 723–741 (2012), Copyright Elsevier⁷³. The non-scrambled image is a stock photo (iStock.com/Liubomyr Vorona), comparable to the images that were used from the IAPS database⁷¹. C Flash suppression. Two naturalistic images, a preferred (face) and nonpreferred (place) image, were used. Perception is shifted from one image to the other by flash suppression (FS F→P and FS P→F), real alternation (RA F→P and RA P→F), or no perceptual shift (Con). The first 1000 ms are defined as phase 1, and the last 400 ms as phase 2. D Binocular rivalry. Same stimuli as in flash suppression. The Rivalry condition was performed with the preferred stimulus in the dominant (Face Dom Rivalry) and the nondominant eye (Place Dom Rivalry). Both stimuli were also presented binocularly for the entire duration of the experiment or alternated binocularly at a frequency of 1 Hz. Each trial lasted 10 s for patients 2, 3, and 4, and 24 s for patient 1. “D” and “ND” represent Dominant and Non-Dominant eye in (C and D). The face and place image in (C and D) are stock photos (face: iStock.com/Djavan Rodriguez; place: iStock.com/Iakov Kalinin).