Cyclopean discrimination thresholds for the direction and speed of motion in depth.

We measured just-noticeable differences in the direction and speed of motion in depth of cyclopean and monocularly visible targets. Our stimulus set comprised different combinations of (d phi/dt)/(d delta/ dt), d delta/dt, d phi/dt and delta delta, where d phi/dt was the angular frontal plane speed of the binocularly-fused target, d delta/dt was its rate of change of disparity and delta delta was its disparity displacement. Our three subjects based their direction discriminations entirely on the task-relevant variable (d phi/dt)/(d delta/dt), and based their speed discriminations entirely on the task-relevant variable d delta/dt. They ignored all task-irrelevant variables in both tasks. Performance on both tasks was the same for motion within the horizontal and vertical meridians. Direction discrimination threshold rose significantly as the reference direction grew more oblique with respect to a line passing midway between the eyes and perpendicular to the frontal plane. Performance on the direction discrimination task was significantly better for the noncyclopean than for the cyclopean target, but the difference was not great. For the cyclopean target, the lowest value of the direction discrimination threshold was 0.70 deg (mean of three observers and two meridians). The Weber fraction for discriminating speed was not significantly different for the cyclopean and monocularly visible targets, and did not depend on the direction of motion in depth. The lowest values (mean of three observers and two meridians) were 0.12 (cyclopean) and 0.10 (noncyclopean). Findings did not scale for viewing distance. We propose that the human visual pathway contains: (a) a cyclopean mechanism sensitive to variations in the ratio (d phi/dt)/(d delta/dt) that is comparatively insensitive to both d phi/dt and d delta/dt; and (b) a speed-sensitive cyclopean mechanism that responds to variations in the value of d delta/dt, but is comparatively insensitive to d phi/dt. We also propose that a single speed-sensitive mechanism determines speed discrimination thresholds for both cyclopean and monocularly visible targets.