Department of Biology and Geosciences, Graduate School of Science, Osaka City University, Osaka, Japan.
Science. 2012 Jan 27;335(6067):469-71. doi: 10.1126/science.1211667.
The principal eyes of jumping spiders have a unique retina with four tiered photoreceptor layers, on each of which light of different wavelengths is focused by a lens with appreciable chromatic aberration. We found that all photoreceptors in both the deepest and second-deepest layers contain a green-sensitive visual pigment, although green light is only focused on the deepest layer. This mismatch indicates that the second-deepest layer always receives defocused images, which contain depth information of the scene in optical theory. Behavioral experiments revealed that depth perception in the spider was affected by the wavelength of the illuminating light, which affects the amount of defocus in the images resulting from chromatic aberration. Therefore, we propose a depth perception mechanism based on how much the retinal image is defocused.
跳蛛的主眼具有独特的四层感光细胞层的视网膜，不同波长的光在每一层都被一个具有明显色差的透镜聚焦。我们发现，最深和第二层的所有感光细胞都含有绿色感光视色素，尽管绿光只聚焦在最深层。这种不匹配表明，第二层总是接收到散焦的图像，根据光学理论，这些图像包含了场景的深度信息。行为实验表明，蜘蛛的深度感知受到照明光波长的影响，这会影响色差导致的图像的散焦程度。因此，我们提出了一种基于视网膜图像散焦程度的深度感知机制。
