Seeing motion in depth using inter-ocular velocity differences

An object moving in depth produces retinal images that change in position over time by different amounts in the two eyes. This allows stereoscopic perception of motion in depth to be based on either one or both of two different visual signals: inter-ocular velocity differences, and binocular disparity change over time. Disparity change over time can produce the perception of motion in depth. However, demonstrating the same for inter-ocular velocity differences has proved elusive because of the difficulty of isolating this cue from disparity change (the inverse can easily be done). No physiological data are available, and existing psychophysical data are inconclusive as to whether inter-ocular velocity differences are used in primate vision. Here, we use motion adaptation to assess the contribution of inter-ocular velocity differences to the perception of motion in depth. If inter-ocular velocity differences contribute to motion in depth, we would expect that discriminability of direction of motion in depth should be improved after adaptation to frontoparallel motion. This is because an inter-ocular velocity difference is a comparison between two monocular frontoparallel motion signals, and because frontoparallel speed discrimination improves after motion adaptation. We show that adapting to frontoparallel motion does improve both frontoparallel speed discrimination and motion-in-depth direction discrimination. No improvement would be expected if only disparity change over time contributes to motion in depth. Furthermore, we found that frontoparallel motion adaptation diminishes discrimination of both speed and direction of motion in depth in dynamic random dot stereograms, in which changing disparity is the only cue available. The results provide strong evidence that inter-ocular velocity differences contribute to the perception of motion in depth and thus that the human visual system contains mechanisms for detecting differences in velocity between the two eyes' retinal images.