Spatio-Temporal Aspects of Binocular Depth Discrimination

Abstract

When I originally planned my presentation for this Symposium, convened to dedicate the new Optometry Building in Houston, I had intended to discuss some of our experiments on temporal factors in binocular vision. These experiments, many of which are still unpublished, deal with four interrelated classes of binocular functions: (i) the effects of exposure duration on stereoscopic thresholds; (ii) the effects of interocular delay on binocular depth discrimination; (iii) depth-displacement effects obtained in studies on the Pulfrich effect (1) in relation to correlative psychophysical and electrophysiological studies on simple visual reaction time and on visual evoked potentials; and (iv) depth-displacement effects obtained in the so-called Mach-Dvorak phenomenon (2). As I began to prepare and organize the necessary slides for my presentation, it became quite obvious that I could not effectively deal with more than one of these topics in the limited time alloted. I decided, finally, to limit my presentation to a discussion of some of my recent work on the Mach-Dvorak phenomenon, performed with the aid of several of my student assistants¹.