Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, United States of America.
Department of Neuroscience, School of Medicine and Public Health, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2020 Mar 9;15(3):e0229929. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0229929. eCollection 2020.
The visual system exploits multiple signals, including monocular and binocular cues, to determine the motion of objects through depth. In the laboratory, sensitivity to different three-dimensional (3D) motion cues varies across observers and is often weak for binocular cues. However, laboratory assessments may reflect factors beyond inherent perceptual sensitivity. For example, the appearance of weak binocular sensitivity may relate to extensive prior experience with two-dimensional (2D) displays in which binocular cues are not informative. Here we evaluated the impact of experience on motion-in-depth (MID) sensitivity in a virtual reality (VR) environment. We tested a large cohort of observers who reported having no prior VR experience and found that binocular cue sensitivity was substantially weaker than monocular cue sensitivity. As expected, sensitivity was greater when monocular and binocular cues were presented together than in isolation. Surprisingly, the addition of motion parallax signals appeared to cause observers to rely almost exclusively on monocular cues. As observers gained experience in the VR task, sensitivity to monocular and binocular cues increased. Notably, most observers were unable to distinguish the direction of MID based on binocular cues above chance level when tested early in the experiment, whereas most showed statistically significant sensitivity to binocular cues when tested late in the experiment. This result suggests that observers may discount binocular cues when they are first encountered in a VR environment. Laboratory assessments may thus underestimate the sensitivity of inexperienced observers to MID, especially for binocular cues.
视觉系统利用多种信号，包括单眼和双眼线索，来确定物体通过深度的运动。在实验室中，不同的三维（3D）运动线索的敏感性因观察者而异，并且对于双眼线索通常较弱。然而，实验室评估可能反映了超出固有感知敏感性的因素。例如，弱双眼敏感性的出现可能与广泛的二维（2D）显示器使用经验有关，其中双眼线索没有信息量。在这里，我们在虚拟现实（VR）环境中评估了经验对深度运动（MID）敏感性的影响。我们测试了一个由大量没有 VR 经验的观察者组成的队列，发现双眼线索的敏感性明显弱于单眼线索的敏感性。正如预期的那样，当同时呈现单眼和双眼线索时，敏感性比单独呈现时更高。令人惊讶的是，添加运动视差信号似乎导致观察者几乎完全依赖单眼线索。随着观察者在 VR 任务中获得经验，对单眼和双眼线索的敏感性增加。值得注意的是，在实验早期测试时，大多数观察者无法根据双眼线索区分 MID 的方向，而在实验后期测试时，大多数观察者对双眼线索表现出具有统计学意义的敏感性。这一结果表明，观察者可能在首次遇到 VR 环境中的双眼线索时会对其产生怀疑。因此，实验室评估可能会低估无经验观察者对 MID 的敏感性，尤其是对双眼线索的敏感性。
