Stereo transparency in ambiguous stereograms generated by overlapping two identical dot patterns.

In binocular vision, observers can perceive transparent surfaces by fusing a stereogram composed of two overlapping patterns with different disparities. When dot patterns of two surfaces are identical, the stereogram has potential matches leading to both transparency and non-transparency (or unitary surface) perceptions. However, these two matching candidates are exclusive if the uniqueness assumption holds. This stereogram can be regarded as a random-dot version of the double-nail illusion and a stereo version of the locally paired-dot stimulus that was used to investigate the neural mechanism for motion transparency. Which surface is perceived in this ambiguous stereogram would reflect the property of the transparency detection mechanism in human stereopsis. Here we perform a parametric study to examine the perceptual property in this ambiguous stereogram. The result showed that the ability in transparency detection from this stereogram is determined by the contrast reversal ratio between overlapping patterns within small regions the width of which was about 0.4 deg. The width was similar to the receptive field sizes of neurons in striate cortex. The result suggests that the contrast reversal between two identical patterns would modulate activities of binocular neurons, and this modification gives a crucial effect on the neural representation for overlapping disparities.