Steering, optic flow, and the respective importance of depth and retinal motion distribution

Movement through an environment produces an optical spatiotemporal pattern, known as a flow field. When visually guiding movement using a flow field, do humans make use of information about the distance of constituent element s? Employing a novel active steering task, we examined the use of depth (he ight-in-scene and disparity) and the role of the retinal motion distributio n in the perceptual control of heading from flow. We found that retinal mot ion distribution, rather than depth order, has the primary role in determin ing the accuracy of steering.