Does valence influence perceptual bias towards incongruence during binocular rivalry?

The efficient processing of complex visual environments is essential for effective functioning. In the natural environment, processing the context is as important as the processing of the target object since no object can be found in isolation. Congruent object-context associations in a visual scene facilitate object recognition, whereas incongruent associations decrease performance accuracy. Although there is a performance reduction, incongruent scenes are reported to have a perceptual bias due to the reallocation of the attentional resources towards the associated semantic conflict. Another key attribute that prepares the visual system to identify the important aspects of the environment is valence, and any visual scene can be classified into one of the three valence categories. Hence, the current study was designed to investigate how valence influences the perceptual bias towards incongruent object-context associations. An intermittent binocular rivalry task was used to measure the perceptual bias across valence categories. The results revealed a significant predominance of incongruent pictures when the associated valence was negative and neutral and remained unbiased for positive valence. We propose a valence–congruency interaction in which perceptual bias towards incongruence is greatly influenced by valence.