The Ferrier Lecture, 1992. Seeing depth with two eyes: stereopsis.
The primate's two eyes both point forward, and are a few centimetres apart. The task of extracting depth from two slightly dissimilar two-dimensional retinal images falls on the central nervous system. The mechanism is so effective that a good observer can detect, by stereopsis alone, depth differences of as small as 10 microns at a distance of 25 cm. Psychophysical and neurophysiological studies have begun to unravel the neural circuits in the brain which process the retinal signals to yield stereoscopic information.
Westheimer
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Division of Neurobiology, University of California, Berkeley 94720-3200.
D000818:Animals; D003867:Depth Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008959:Models, Neurological; D011323:Primates / Q000502:physiology; D011601:Psychophysics; D015357:Vision Disparity / Q000502:physiology; D014793:Visual Cortex / Q000502:physiology