Binocular space and its representation by cellular assemblies in the brain

Abstract

It is shown that Luneburg's essentially psychophysical theory suffers from the limitations of a metric, whose coefficients are functions of the coordinates only. This ignores the contributions to space perception of the total stimulus configuration. Blank's reference of the co-ordinates to the horizon does not suffice to remove this difficulty. To say that the iseikonic transformation takes one stimulus configuration into a perceptually equivalent one is tantamount to the proposition that the only cues for binocular space perception are the relative stimulus points on the two retinae. It might then have been more likely that there should exist fixed “wired circuits” in the brain, which act as pattern recognizers. This, apparently, does not agree with the experimental evidence. Instead we propose that only a co-ordinate system could be “wired” into the brain and that the rest of pattern recognition is based on computation which involves other than merely the usual stereoscopic cues.