Binocular Disparity - Tricking Neurons With 2D Images

Tricking Neurons With 2D Images

Brain cells (neurons) in a part of the brain responsible for processing visual information coming from the retinae (primary visual cortex) can detect the existence of disparity in their input from the eyes. Specifically, these neurons will be active, if an object with "their" special disparity lies within the part of the visual field to which they have access (receptive field).

Researchers investigating precise properties of these neurons with respect to disparity present visual stimuli with different disparities to the cells and look whether they are active or not. One possibility to present stimuli with different disparities is to place objects in varying depth in front of the eyes. However, the drawback to this method may not be precise enough for objects placed further away as they possess smaller disparities while objects closer will have greater disparities. Instead, neuroscientists use an alternate method as schematised in Figure 2.

Figure 2: The disparity of an object with different depth than the fixation point can alternatively be produced by presenting an image of the object to one eye and a laterally shifted version of the same image to the other eye. The full black circle is the point of fixation. Objects in varying depths are placed along the line of fixation of the left eye. The same disparity produced from a shift in depth of an object (filled coloured circles) can also be produced by laterally shifting the object in constant depth in the picture one eye sees (black circles with coloured margin). Note that for near disparities the lateral shift has to be larger to correspond to the same depth compared with far disparities. This is what neuroscientists usually do with random dot stimuli to study disparity selectivity of neurons since the lateral distance required to test disparities is less than the distances required using depth tests. This principle has also been applied in autostereogram illusions.