Perceiving depth order during pursuit eye movement

Pursuit eye movements alter retinal motion cues to depth. For instance, the sinusoidal retinal velocity profile produced by a translating, corrugated surface resembles a sinusoidal shear during pursuit. One way to recover the correct spatial phase of the corrugation's profile (i.e. which part is near and which part is far) is to combine estimates of shear with extra-retinal estimates of translation. In support of this hypothesis, we found the corrugation's spatial phase appeared ambiguous when retinal shear was viewed without translation, but unambiguous when translated and viewed with or without a pursuit eye movement. The eyes lagged the sinusoidal translation by a small but persistent amount, raising the possibility that retinal slip could serve as the disambiguating cue in the eye-moving condition. A yoked control was therefore performed in which measured horizontal slip was fed back into a fixated shearing stimulus on a trial-by-trial basis. The results showed that the corrugation's phase was only seen unambiguously during the real eye movement. This supports the idea that extra-retinal estimates of eye velocity can help disambiguate ordinal depth structure within moving retinal images.