Stereoscopic vision in the absence of the lateral occipital cortex

Read, J.C.A.; Phillipson, G.P.; Serrano-Pedraza, I.; Milner, A.D.; Parker, A.J.

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0012608

Stereoscopic vision in the absence of the lateral occipital cortex

Read, J.C.A.; Phillipson, G.P.; Serrano-Pedraza, I.; Milner, A.D.; Parker, A.J.

Authors

J.C.A. Read

G.P. Phillipson

I. Serrano-Pedraza

A.D. Milner

A.J. Parker

Abstract

Both dorsal and ventral cortical visual streams contain neurons sensitive to binocular disparities, but the two streams may underlie different aspects of stereoscopic vision. Here we investigate stereopsis in the neurological patient D.F., whose ventral stream, specifically lateral occipital cortex, has been damaged bilaterally, causing profound visual form agnosia. Despite her severe damage to cortical visual areas, we report that DF's stereo vision is strikingly unimpaired. She is better than many control observers at using binocular disparity to judge whether an isolated object appears near or far, and to resolve ambiguous structure-from-motion. DF is, however, poor at using relative disparity between features at different locations across the visual field. This may stem from a difficulty in identifying the surface boundaries where relative disparity is available. We suggest that the ventral processing stream may play a critical role in enabling healthy observers to extract fine depth information from relative disparities within one surface or between surfaces located in different parts of the visual field.

Citation

Read, J., Phillipson, G., Serrano-Pedraza, I., Milner, A., & Parker, A. (2010). Stereoscopic vision in the absence of the lateral occipital cortex. PLoS ONE, 5(9), Article e12608. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0012608

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Aug 12, 2010
Online Publication Date	Sep 7, 2010
Publication Date	Sep 7, 2010
Deposit Date	Dec 13, 2010
Publicly Available Date	Jan 25, 2012
Journal	PLoS ONE
Publisher	Public Library of Science
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	5
Issue	9
Article Number	e12608
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0012608

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Copyright Statement
Copyright: © 2010 Read et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.