Stereopsis and aging

Three experiments investigated whether and to what extent increases in age affect the functionality of stereopsis. The observers' ages ranged from 18 to 83 years. The overall goal was to challenge the older stereoscopic visual system by utilizing high magnitudes of binocular disparity, ambiguous binocular disparity [cf., Julesz, B., & Chang, J. (1976). Interaction between pools of binocular disparity detectors tuned to different disparities. Biological Cybernetics, 22, 107-119], and by making binocular matching more difficult. In particular, Experiment 1 evaluated observers' abilities to discriminate ordinal depth differences away from the horopter using standing disparities of 6.5-46 min arc. Experiment 2 assessed observers' abilities to discriminate stereoscopic shape using line-element stereograms. The direction (crossed vs. uncrossed) and magnitude of the binocular disparity (13.7 and 51.5 min arc) were manipulated. Binocular matching was made more difficult by varying the orientations of corresponding line elements across the two eyes' views. The purpose of Experiment 3 was to determine whether the aging stereoscopic system can resolve ambiguous binocular disparities in a manner similar to that of younger observers. The results of all experiments demonstrated that older observers' stereoscopic vision is functionally comparable to that of younger observers in many respects. For example, both age groups exhibited a similar ability to discriminate depth and surface shape. The results also showed, however, that age-related differences in stereopsis do exist, and they become most noticeable when the older stereoscopic system is challenged by multiple simultaneous factors.