The role of binocular vision in grasping: a small stimulus-set distorts results

The role of binocular vision in grasping has frequently been assessed by measuring the effects on grasp kinematics of covering one eye. These studies have typically used three or fewer objects presented at three or fewer distances, raising the possibility that participants learn the properties of the stimulus set. If so, even relatively poor visual information may be sufficient to identify which object/distance configuration is presented on a given trial, in effect providing an additional source of depth information. Here we show that the availability of this uncontrolled cue leads to an underestimate of the effects of removing binocular information, and therefore to an overestimate of the effectiveness of the remaining cues. We measured the effects of removing binocular cues on visually open-loop grasps using (1) a conventional small stimulus-set, and (2) a large, pseudo-randomised stimulus set, which could not be learned. Removing binocular cues resulted in a significant change in grip aperture scaling in both conditions: peak grip apertures were larger (when reaching to small objects), and scaled less with increases in object size. However, this effect was significantly larger with the randomised stimulus set. These results confirm that binocular information makes a significant contribution to grasp planning. Moreover, they suggest that learned stimulus information can contribute to grasping in typical experiments, and so the contribution of information from binocular vision (and from other depth cues) may not have been measured accurately.