Projected disparity, not horizontal disparity, predicts stereo depth of 1-D patterns

Binocular disparities have a straightforward geometric relation to object depth, but the computation that humans use to turn disparity signals into depth percepts is neither straightforward nor well understood. One seemingly solid result, which came out of Wheatstone’s work in the 1830s, is that the sign and magnitude of horizontal disparity predict the perceived depth of an object: ‘positive’ horizontal disparities yield the perception of ‘far’ depth, ‘negative’ horizontal disparities yield the perception of ‘near’ depth, and variations in the magnitude of horizontal disparity monotonically increase or decrease the perceived extent of depth. Here we show that this classic link between horizontal disparity and the perception of ‘near’ versus ‘far’ breaks down when the stimuli are one-dimensional. For these stimuli, horizontal is not a privileged disparity direction. Instead of relying on horizontal disparities to determine their depth relative to that of two-dimensional stimuli, the visual system uses a disparity calculation that is non-veridical yet well suited to deal with the joint coding of disparity and orientation.