Neural mechanisms of binocular vision

The first publication of Vision Research in 1961 occurred at a time that can be seen in retrospect as marking a watershed in the history of binocular vision. Before that time it was generally believed that binocular depth perception was based on high-level quasi-cognitive events that took place somewhere in the no-man’s land between brain and mind. The adoption of such a view is easy to understand. We do not readily appreciate any change in the appearance of objects when we close one eye. The world we see seems not to change at all and visual acuity seems unaffected. From observations such as these the conclusion seems to follow that the form of objects is first elaborated for each eye separately and that stereopsis is added at a subsequent stage by the conjunction of these separately-elaborated uniocular forms. In one of his lectures Helmholtz (1868) considered the problem of seeing in three dimensions. He wrote:

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