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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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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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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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/699
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