Motion parallax enables depth processing for action in a visual form agnosic when binocular vision is unavailable

Abstract

Visual-form agnosic patient DF, who has severe difficulties in using visual information about size, shape and orientation for perceptual report, can nevertheless--under normal viewing conditions--use the same information to accurately guide her hand movements. However, her performance of prehension tasks requiring the analysis of visual depth is severely disrupted when binocular vision is prevented. We have suggested that this deterioration in visuomotor control is due to an inability to use pictorial depth cues to compensate for the removal of binocular vision. In the current study we investigated whether DF was able to use motion parallax as an alternative to binocular cues. We asked her to grasp a square plaque slanted at different orientations in depth, under two monocular testing conditions. In one condition her head remained stationary on a chin rest, and in the other condition she made large lateral head movements just prior to each prehension movement. The results confirmed that DF is impaired in adjusting her hand orientation to the orientation of the target object when reaching monocularly with her head stationary. In contrast, when she made head movements, her manual performance was restored to almost normal levels. Our results are consistent with the idea that the processing of pictorial depth cues depends on the cortical ventral stream, which is known to be disrupted by DF's lesion. They further indicate that orientation in depth can be computed from motion parallax just as well as from binocular cues in the absence of a normally functioning ventral stream.