Defaults in stereoscopic and kinetic depth perception.

Abstract

This study presents three findings concerning the mechanisms of depth perception. First, the shape of the three-dimensional percept evoked by two-frame motion is defined solely by the rotation component around an axis in the frontoparallel plane; the visual system assigns a default value to this rotation component to arrive at a unique solution. Second, when the visual axes of two eyes are almost parallel, the visual system uses a default vergence value to reconstruct stereoscopic depth. Third, the default vergence and default rotation angles are highly correlated across subjects. This correlation implies that the two modalities share a common scaling default at an internal level.