Is stereopsis optimized for our natural environment?

Stereopsis is adaptive for the natural environment

Humans and many animals have forward-facing eyes providing different views of the environment. Precise depth estimates can be derived from the resulting binocular disparities, but determining which parts of the two retinal images correspond to one another is computationally challenging. To aid the computation, the visual system focuses the search on a small range of disparities. We asked whethe...

Stereopsis: Where Depth is Seen

Disparity-selective cells appear to occur in all parts of the visual cortex, but a recent fMRI study finds that some cortical areas are more strongly associated with disparity than others. More sophisticated tests of binocular function may be needed to identify the properties of single neurons that support this specialization.

This is dedicated to our former chairman Dr. Mahmoud Rohani

Is Our Mathematics Natural? the Case of Equilibrium Statistical Mechanics

IS human 20th-century mathematics a natural or an arbitrary logical construct? Some insight into this ill-posed but fascinating question is gained from the study of mathematical physics. A number of ideas introduced by physical rather than mathematical necessity turn out later to be mathematically useful. (Equilibrium statistical mechanics has been a particularly rich source of such ideas.) In ...

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