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.
Division of Neurobiology, University of California, Berkeley 94720-3200.
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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