Trends in Cognitive Sciences
The visual perception of 3D shape
Section snippets
Sources of information about 3D shape
There are many different aspects of optical stimulation that are known to provide perceptually salient information about 3D shape. Several of these properties are exemplified in Figure 1. They include variations of image intensity or shading, gradients of optical texture from patterns of polka dots or surface contours, and line drawings that depict the edges and vertices of objects. Other sources of visual information are defined by systematic transformations among multiple images, including
Psychophysical investigations of 3D shape perception
The earliest psychophysical experiments on perceived 3D shape were performed in the 19th century to investigate stereoscopic vision, although the stimuli used were generally restricted to small points of light presented in otherwise total darkness. These studies revealed that observers' perceptions can be systematically distorted, such that physically straight lines in the environment can appear perceptually to be curved, and apparent intervals in depth become systematically compressed with
The perceptual representation of 3D shape
Almost all existing theoretical models for computing the 3D structures of arbitrary surfaces from visual information are designed to generate a particular form of data structure that can be referred to generically as a ‘local property map’. The basic idea is quite simple and powerful. A visual scene is broken up into a matrix of small local neighborhoods, each of which is characterized by a number (or a set of numbers) to represent some particular local aspect of 3D structure, such as depth or
The neural processing of 3D shape
Although most of our current knowledge about the perception of 3D shape has come from computational analyses and psychophysical investigations, there has been a growing effort in recent years to identify the neural mechanisms that are involved in the processing of 3D shape. The first sources of evidence relating to this topic were obtained from lesion studies in monkeys 35, 36. The results revealed that animals with bilateral ablations of the inferior temporal cortex are severely impaired in
Conclusion
Psychophysical investigations have revealed that observers' judgments about 3D shape are often systematically distorted, but that these distortions are constrained to a limited set of transformations in a manner that is consistent with current computational analyses. These findings suggest that the perceptual representation of 3D shape is likely to be primarily based on qualitative aspects of 3D structure that can be determined reliably from visual information. One possible form of data
Acknowledgements
The preparation of this manuscript was supported by grants from NIH (R01-Ey12432) and NSF (BCS-0079277).
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