A PHYSIOLOGICAL MODEL FOR MOTION-STEREO INTEGRATION AND A UNIFIED EXPLANATION OF PULFRICH-LIKE PHENOMENA

Many psychophysical and physiological experiments indicate that visual motion analysis and stereoscopic depth perception are processed toget her in the brain. However, little computational effort has been devote d to combining these two visual modalities into a common framework bas ed on physiological mechanisms. We present such an integrated model in this paper. We have previously developed a physiologically realistic model for binocular disparity computation (Qian, 1994), Here we demons trate that under some general and physiological assumptions, our stere o vision model can be combined naturally with motion energy models to achieve motion-stereo integration, The integrated model may be used to explain a wide range of experimental observations regarding motion-st ereo interaction. As an example, we show that the model can provide a unified account of the classical Pulfrich effect (Morgan gr Thompson, 1975) and the generalized Pulfrich phenomena to dynamic noise patterns (Tyler, 1974; Falk, 1980) and stroboscopic stimuli (Burr & Ross, 1979 ). (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.