Monocular rivalry is a phenomenon of human visual perception that occurs when two different images are optically superimposed.
As long as the two component stimuli differ spatiotemporally in some way, such as orientation (as shown), spatial frequency, or direction of movement, monocular rivalry can be seen.
[5] They argued that with gratings, prolonged fixation of the stimuli builds up a negative afterimage that will tend to cancel the real images, making both invisible (a form of neural adaptation).
[7] Second, it occurs when the stimuli themselves are afterimages; these cannot be cancelled or reinforced by eye movements (Crassini & Broerse, 1982).
[8] Third, sometimes a perceptual alternation occurs after an eye movement in the wrong direction for Georgeson and Phillips's explanation (Bradley & Schor, 1988).
[2] Leopold and Logothetis (1999) argued that it, and binocular rivalry, are examples of multistable perception phenomena, including the Necker cube and Rubin vase figure.