Binocular disparity can augment the capacity of vision without affecting subjective experience of depth

Abstract

Binocular disparity results in a tangible subjective experience of three-dimensional world, but whether disparity also augments objective perceptual performance remains debated. We hypothesized that the improved coding of depth enabled by binocular disparity allows participants to individuate more objects at a glance as the objects can be more efficiently differentiated from each other and the background. We asked participants to enumerate objects in briefly presented naturalistic (Experiment 1) and artificial (Experiment 2) scenes in immersive virtual reality. This type of enumeration task yields well-documented capacity limits where up to 3-4 items can be enumerated rapidly and accurately, known as subitizing. Our results show that although binocular disparity did not yield a large general improvement in enumeration accuracy or reaction times, it improved participants' ability to process the items right after the limit of perceptual capacity. Binocular disparity also sped-up response times by 27 ms on average when artificial stimuli (cubes) were used. Interestingly, the influence of disparity on subjectively experienced depth revealed a clearly different pattern than the influence of disparity on objective performance. This suggests that the functional and subjective sides of stereopsis can be dissociated. Altogether our results suggest that binocular disparity may increase the number of items the visual system can simultaneously process. This may help animals to better resolve and track objects in complex, cluttered visual environments.

Figure 1

(A) Task and stimuli. Schematic presentation of a single trial with cube stimuli (left; Experiment 2), the experimental set up (top right), and an example of a scene stimulus (Experiment 1). In the experiments, the stimuli (1–6 objects) were always presented binocularly and disparity was manipulated. In one condition the participants were asked to enumerate the individuals in the scene and in the other condition the participants rated the strength of their experience of depth. (B) Hypotheses concerning enumeration accuracy.

Figure 2

Results of Experiment 1. Error bars show 95% CIs.

Figure 3

Results of Experiment 2. Error bars show 95% CIs.