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Perceiving Depth or Distance: Binocular Cues

There are two types of depth cues that people rely on to perceive depth and distance: binocular cues and monocular cues. Binocular cues involve retinal disparity and convergence which use slight differences between the images seen by each eye. Monocular cues include motion parallax, relative size, linear perspective, and other pictorial cues that can provide depth information from a single image. Some monocular cues like accommodation also involve active eye movements. The ability to interpret pictorial depth cues can vary across cultures depending on experience with 2D representations.

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143 views2 pages

Perceiving Depth or Distance: Binocular Cues

There are two types of depth cues that people rely on to perceive depth and distance: binocular cues and monocular cues. Binocular cues involve retinal disparity and convergence which use slight differences between the images seen by each eye. Monocular cues include motion parallax, relative size, linear perspective, and other pictorial cues that can provide depth information from a single image. Some monocular cues like accommodation also involve active eye movements. The ability to interpret pictorial depth cues can vary across cultures depending on experience with 2D representations.

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syed hamza
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Depth Perception

Perceiving Depth or Distance


More often than not, forms and figures are objects in space. Spatial considerations add a third dimension to visual perception.
Depth perception involves interpretation of visual cues that indicate how near or far away objects are. To make judgments of
distance, people rely on a variety of cues, which can be classified into two types: binocular and monocular (Hochberg, 1988;
Proffitt & Caudek, 2003).
Binocular Cues
Because the eyes are set apart, each eye has a slightly different view of the world. Binocular depth cues are clues about distance
based on the differing views of the two eyes. “Stereo” viewers like the View master toy you may have had as a child make use of
this principle by presenting slightly different flat images of the same scene to each eye. The brain then supplies the “depth,” and
you perceive a three-dimensional scene.
The principal binocular depth cue is retinal disparity, which refers to the fact that objects within 25 feet project images to
slightly different locations on the right and left retinas, so each eye sees a slightly different view of the object. The closer an
object gets, the greater the disparity between the images seen by each eye. Thus, retinal disparity increases as objects come closer,
providing information about distance. Another binocular cue is convergence, which involves sensing the eyes converging toward
each other as they focus on closer objects.
Monocular Cues
Monocular depth cues are clues about distance based on the image in either eye alone. There are two kinds of monocular cues
to depth. One kind is the result of active use of the eye in viewing the world. For example, as an object comes closer, you may
sense the accommodation (the change in the curvature of the lens) that must occur for the eye to adjust its focus. Furthermore, if
you cover one eye and move your head from side to side, closer objects appear to move more than distant objects. In a similar vein,
you may notice when driving along a highway that nearby objects (such as fenceposts along the road) appear to move by more
rapidly than objects that are farther away (such as trees in the distance). Thus, you get cues about depth from motion parallax,
which involves images of objects at different distances moving across the retina at different rates.
The other kind of monocular cues are pictorial depth cues—clues about distance that can be given in a flat picture. There are
many pictorial cues to depth, which is why some paintings and photographs seem so realistic that you feel you can climb right into
them. Six prominent pictorial depth cues are described and illustrated in Figure 4.33. Linear perspective is a depth cue reflecting
the fact that lines converge in the distance. Because details are too small to see when they are far away, texture gradients can
provide information about depth. If an object comes between you and another object, it must be closer to you, a cue called
interposition. Relative size is a cue because closer objects appear larger. Height in plane reflects the fact that distant objects appear
higher in a picture. Finally, the familiar effects of shadowing make light and shadow useful in judging distance. There appear to be
some cultural differences in the ability to take advantage of pictorial depth cues in two-dimensional drawings. These differences
were first investigated by Hudson (1960, 1967), who presented pictures like that shown in Figure 4.34 to various cultural groups in
South Africa. Hudson’s approach was based on the assumption that subjects who indicate that the hunter is trying to spear the
elephant instead of the antelope don’t understand the depth cues (interposition, relative size, height in plane) in the picture, which
place the elephant in the distance. Hudson found that subjects from a rural South African tribe (the Bantu), who had little exposure
at that time to pictures and photos, frequently misinterpreted the depth cues in his pictures. Similar difficulties with depth cues in
pictures have been documented for other cultural groups who have little experience with two-dimensional representations of three-
dimensional space (Berry et al., 1992). Thus, the application of pictorial depth cues to pictures varies to some degree across
cultures.

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