Stereopsis: How the brain sees depth

Stereopsis: How the brain sees depth

Recent studies show how single neurons detect binocular disparities. But how these signals are used for stereoscopic perception remains a puzzle.

How the brain sees in three dimensions.

When Renaissance painters solved the problem of depicting three-dimensional (3D) scenes on flat canvases, their paintings blossomed into realistic representations of the world. Our brain must solve this problem every day to reconstruct 3D views from images that fall on the 2D surface of our retinas. Researchers have long known that we use various cues to accomplish this, such as the stereoscopi...

From stereogram to surface: how the brain sees the world in depth.

When we look at a scene, how do we consciously see surfaces infused with lightness and color at the correct depths? Random-Dot Stereograms (RDS) probe how binocular disparity between the two eyes can generate such conscious surface percepts. Dense RDS do so despite the fact that they include multiple false binocular matches. Sparse stereograms do so even across large contrast-free regions with ...

From Stereograms to Surface: How the Brain Sees the World in Depth

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.