Depth perception and evoked brain activity: the influence of horizontal disparity and visual field location

The perception of dynamic random-dot stereograms (RDS) depends on the physiological fusion of horizontally disparate binocular visual input. Thus, the use of RDS offers the possibility to study selectively cortical processing of visual information in man. We investigated the influence of horizontal disparity on the scalp topography of RDS evoked brain activity in 33 healthy subjects. Stereoscopic checkerboard patterns were presented in the center or lateralized in the left or right visual field with horizontal disparities changing at temporal frequencies of six or eight depth reversals/s using different disparity values ranging from 3.5 to 28 min of arc. In 11 subjects evoked potential fields were recorded from 16 electrodes, and 21 subjects participated in 30-channel recordings with electrodes located over the parietal and occipital brain areas. Stimulation frequency-related brain activity was obtained with all disparity values; however, with large or small disparities the potential field strength decreased significantly while largest responses were obtained with intermediate disparities. Significant differences were observed in RDS evoked brain activity when central and lateralized stimulus locations were compared. With lateral stimuli (extending from the fovea to 17.1-deg eccentricity) maximal amplitudes were obtained at larger disparities than with central stimuli. In addition there were pronounced differences between brain activity evoked with stimuli presented in the left or right visual field; however, there were very similar evoked potential signals recorded from electrodes located over the left and right hemispheres. Our findings indicate that the processing of disparity information with lateralized stimuli is different from the processing in the center of the visual field. In addition, lateralized stimulation yields a significant disparity tuning mainly with stereoscopic targets occurring to the right from the fixation point (but not with stimuli to the left) suggesting a functional difference between the visual half-fields.