The role of binocular stereopsis in monoptic depth perception

Abstract

In his study of depth from monocular elements, Kaye (1978) [Kaye, M. (1978). Stereopsis without binocular correlation. Vision Research, 18(8), 1013–1022] reported that monocular stimuli, briefly presented to one eye in a stereoscopic display, generated reliable depth percepts. Here we replicate and extend Kaye’s findings in an effort to identify the mechanism underlying the phenomenon. Our experiments show that the perception of depth is not a simple result of monocular local sign, for the percept of depth disappears when one eye is patched. In subsequent experiments we assess the possibility that the percept results from a very coarse stereoscopic match to either the centroid of the luminance distribution in the unstimulated eye or a simple match to the line of sight in the unstimulated eye. Our results consistently support the match-to-fovea account, and lead us to conclude that monoptic depth is a stereoscopic phenomenon.