Abnormal depth perception from motion parallax in amblyopic observers

Many similarities exist between the perception of depth from binocular stereopsis and that from motion parallax. Moreover, Rogers (1984, cited in, Howard, I. P., & Rogers, B. J. (1995). Binocular vision and stereopsis. Oxford Claridon, New York.) suggests a relationship between an observer's ability to use disparity information and motion parallax information in a depth perception task. To more closely investigate this relationship, depth perception was studied in normal observers and amblyopic observers with poor stereo vision. As expected, amblyopic observers performed much worse than normal observers on depth discriminations requiring use of binocular disparity. However, amblyopic observers also performed much worse than normal observers on depth discriminations based on motion parallax. This result provides supporting evidence for a psychoanatomical link between the perception of depth from motion and the perception of depth from binocular disparity. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.