Ambiguous Perception and Selective Attention - Competitive Processes in Complex Scenarios

Our visual system is confronted with complex and often ambiguous scenes and events every day. This information needs to be transduced, filtered and processed to enable us to behave adequately in our environment. This process of interpreting our environment based on information contained in visible light is called visual perception. The challenges our visual perception is confronted with are manifold. For example, lack of information makes situations difficult to interpret and sometimes visual scenes may allow different interpretations making it hard to compose congruent experiences from them. This thesis comprises five studies investigating visual perception in ambiguous or other complex situations in the laboratory and in the real world. Healthy observers as well as patients suffering from neurodegenerative diseases were investigated and a neural model was used to get a better understanding of the underlying neural mechanisms during ambiguous perception.