Texture discrimination at the cyclopean retina.

One of the open questions within the study of texture discrimination is whether the underlying neural mechanisms are located within the two monocular pathways, or whether they are located at more central areas that process binocular information. This question is considered here in psychophysical experiments of texture discrimination involving stereograms. The results show that texture discrimination for differences in form and size occur after binocular fusion. Moreover, the suitability of random-dot stereograms versus line-figure stereograms for this research has been studied. It was found that discrimination for differences in form was better with line-figure stereograms whereas discrimination for differences in size was better with random-dot stereograms.