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The Journal of Neuroscience, April 19, 2006, 26(16):4370-4382; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4379-05.2006

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Neural Basis for Stereopsis from Second-Order Contrast Cues

Hiroki Tanaka and Izumi Ohzawa

Graduate School of Frontier Biosciences and School of Engineering Science, Osaka University, Osaka 560-8531, Japan

Correspondence should be addressed to Dr. Izumi Ohzawa, Graduate School of Frontier Biosciences and School of Engineering Science, Osaka University, 1-3 Machikaneyama, Toyonaka, Osaka 560-8531, Japan. Email: ohzawa{at}fbs.osaka-u.ac.jp

Humans and animals use visual cues such as brightness and color boundaries to identify objects and navigate through environments. However, even when these cues are not available, we can effortlessly perform these tasks by using second-order cues such as contrast variation (envelope) of patterns on surfaces. Previously, numerous psychophysical studies examined properties of binocular depth processing based on the contrast-envelope cues and suggested the existence of a stereo system that uses these cues. However, its physiological substrate has not been identified yet. Here, we show that a subset of cortical neurons in cat area 18 show binocular interactions for the contrast-envelope stimuli. These neurons are capable of representing a variety of depths in the three-dimensional space based on the information available from contrast cues alone. Furthermore, these neurons show similar disparity-tuning curves for borders defined by both luminance and contrast cues. This cue-invariant tuning is consistent with a linear binocular convergence model for monocular luminance and contrast-envelope processing pathways.

Key words: stereopsis; contrast cues; binocular processing; second-order stimuli; cue invariance; cat area 18; early visual cortex

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Received Aug. 3, 2005; revised March 9, 2006; accepted March 10, 2006.

Correspondence should be addressed to Dr. Izumi Ohzawa, Graduate School of Frontier Biosciences and School of Engineering Science, Osaka University, 1-3 Machikaneyama, Toyonaka, Osaka 560-8531, Japan. Email: ohzawa{at}fbs.osaka-u.ac.jp

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