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Top-down influences on stereoscopic depth-perception

Abstract

The interaction between depth perception and object recognition has important implications for the nature of mental object representations and models of hierarchical organization of visual processing. It is often believed that the computation of depth influences subsequent high-level object recognition processes, and that depth processing is an early vision task that is largely immune to 'top-down' object-specific influences, such as object recognition. Here we present experimental evidence that challenges both these assumptions in the specific context of stereoscopic depth-perception. We have found that observers' recognition of familiar dynamic three-dimensional (3D) objects is unaffected even when the objects' depth structure is scrambled, as long as their two-dimensional (2D) projections are unchanged. Furthermore, the observers seem perceptually unaware of the depth anomalies introduced by scrambling. We attribute the latter result to a top-down recognition-based influence whereby expectations about a familiar object's 3D structure override the true stereoscopic information.

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Figure 1: Example of stimulus.
Figure 2: In the recognizability experiment, subjects viewed depth-scrambled and normal sequences in stereo from different viewing positions indicated by the arrows along the equator at waist level in (a) and (b).
Figure 3: Results of the recognizability experiment averaged across 22 subjects.
Figure 4: Results of the depth-plane experiment averaged across 11 subjects.

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Acknowledgements

We wish to thank N. Logothetis, B. Tjan and D. Kersten for insightful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript and P. Lipson for providing the biological motion data set.

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Correspondence to Isabelle Bülthoff.

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Bülthoff, I., Bülthoff, H. & Sinha, P. Top-down influences on stereoscopic depth-perception. Nat Neurosci 1, 254–257 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/699

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