Abstract
Three experiments are reported in which observers judged the three-dimensional (3-D) structures of virtual or real objects defined by various combinations of texture, motion, and binocular disparity under a wide variety of conditions. The tasks employed in these studies involved adjusting the depth of an object to match its width, adjusting the planes of a dihedral angle so that they appeared orthogonal, and adjusting the shape of an object so that it appeared to match another at a different viewing distance. The results obtained on all of these tasks revealed large constant errors and large individual differences among observers. There were also systematic failures of constancy over changes in viewing distance, orientation, or response task. When considered in conjunction with other, similar reports in the literature, these findings provide strong evidence that human observers do not have accurate perceptions of 3-D metric structure.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Baird, J. C., &Biersdorf, W. R. (1967). Quantitative functions for size and distance judgments.Perception & Psychophysics,2, 161–166.
Battro, A. M., Netto, S. P., &Rozestraten, R. J. A. (1976). Riemannian geometries of variable curvature in visual space: Visual alleys, horopters, and triangles in big open fields.Perception,5, 9–23.
Belhumeur, P. N., Kriegman, D. J., &Yuille, A. L. (1999). The basrelief ambiguity.International Journal of Computer Vision,35, 33–44.
Bennett, B., Hoffman, D., Nicola, J., &Prakash, C. (1989). Structure from two orthographic views of rigid motion.Journal of the Optical Society of America,6, 1052–1069.
Bocheva, N., &Braunstein, M. L. (2000). The contributions of slant and tilt to the detection of local surface orientation in structure from motion.Vision Research,40, 3637–3649.
Bradshaw, M. F., Glennerster, A., &Rogers, B. J. (1996). The effect of display size on disparity scaling from differential perspective and vergence cues.Vision Research,36, 1255–1264.
Bradshaw, M. F., Parton, A. D., &Glennerster, A. (2000). The task-dependent use of binocular disparity and motion parallax information.Vision Research,40, 3725–3734.
Bradshaw, M. F., &Rogers, B. J. (1999). Sensitivity to horizontal and vertical corrugations defined by binocular disparity.Vision Research,39, 3049–3056.
Braunstein, M. L., &Andersen, G. J. (1984). Shape and depth perception from parallel projections of three-dimensional motion.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,10, 749–760.
Braunstein, M. L., Liter, J. C., &Tittle, J. S. (1993). Recovering three-dimensional shape from perspective translations and orthographic rotations.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,19, 598–614.
Braunstein, M. L., &Tittle, J. S. (1988). The observer-relative velocity field as the basis for effective motion parallax.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,14, 582–590.
Brenner, E., &Landy, M. S. (1999). Interaction between the perceived shape of two objects.Vision Research,39, 3834–3848.
Brenner, E., &van Damme, W. J. (1999). Perceived distance, shape and size.Vision Research,39, 975–986.
Bridgeman, B., Kirch, M., &Spirling, A. (1981). Segregation of cognitive and motor aspects of visual function using induced motion.Perception & Psychophysics,29, 336–342.
Cagenello, R., &Rogers, B. J. (1993). Anisotropies in the perception of stereoscopic surfaces: The role of orientation disparity.Vision Research,33, 2189–2201.
Caudek, C., &Proffitt, D. R. (1993). Depth perception in motion parallax and stereokinesis.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,19, 32–47.
Cheng, M. (1968). Tactile-kinesthetic perception of length.American Journal of Psychology,81, 74–82.
Collett, T. S., Schwarz, U., &Sobel, E. C. (1991). The interaction of oculomotor cues and stimulus size in stereoscopic death constancy.Perception,20, 733–754.
Cornilleau-Pérès, V., &Droulez, J. (1989). Visual perception of surface curvature: Psychophysics of curvature detection induced by motion parallax.Perception & Psychophysics,46, 351–364.
Cuijpers, R. H., Kappers, A. M. L., &Koenderink, J. J. (2000a). Investigation of visual space using an exocentric pointing task.Perception & Psychophysics,62, 1556–1571.
Cuijpers, R. H., Kappers, A. M. L., &Koenderink, J. J. (2000b). Large systematic deviations in visual parallelism.Perception,29, 1467–1482.
Daviddon, R. S., &Chang, M. (1964). Apparent distance in the horizontal plane with tactile-kinesthetic stimuli.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,16, 277–281.
Day, R. H., &Wong, T. S. (1971). Radial and tangential movement directions as determinants of the haptic illusion of an L figure.Journal of Experimental Psychology,87, 19–22.
Deregowski, J., &Ellis, H. D. (1972). Effect of stimulus orientation upon haptic perception of the horizontal-vertical illusion.Journal of Experimental Psychology,95, 14–19.
Domini, F., &Braunstein, M. L. (1998). Recovery of 3-D structure from motion is neither Euclidean nor affine.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,24, 1273–1295.
Domini, F., &Caudek, C. (1999). Perceiving surface slant from deformation of optic flow.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,25, 426–444.
Domini, F., Caudek, C., &Proffitt, D. R. (1997). Misperceptions of angular velocities influence the perception of rigidity in the kinetic depth effect.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,23, 1111–1129.
Domini, F., Caudek, C., &Richman, S. (1998). Distortions of depthorder relations and parallelism in structure from motion.Perception & Psychophysics,60, 1164–1174.
Durgin, F. H., Proffitt, D. R., Olson, T. J., &Reinke, K. S. (1995). Comparing depth from motion with depth from binocular disparity.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,21, 679–699.
Eagle, R. A., &Blake, A. (1995). Two-dimensional constraints on three-dimensional structure from motion tasks.Vision Research,35, 2927–2941.
Frisby, J. P., Buckley, D., &Duke, P. A. (1996). Evidence for good recovery of lengths of real objects seen with natural stereo viewing.Perception,25, 129–154.
Frisby, J. P., Buckley, D., &Horsman, J. M. (1995). Integration of stereo, texture, and outline cues during pinhole viewing of real ridgeshaped objects and stereograms of ridges.Perception,24, 181–198.
Fukusima, S. S., Loomis, J. M., &Da Silva, J. A. (1997). Visual perception of egocentric distance as assessed by triangulation.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,23, 86–100.
Gilinsky, A. S. (1951). Perceived size and distance in visual space.Psychological Review,58, 460–482.
Gillam, B., Chambers, D., &Russo, T. (1988). Postfusional latency in stereoscopic slant perception and the primitives of stereopsis.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,14, 163–175.
Gillam, B., Flagg, T., &Finlay, D. (1984). Evidence for disparity change as the primary stimulus for stereoscopic processing.Perception & Psychophysics,36, 559–564.
Glennerster, A., Rogers, B. J., &Bradshaw, M. F. (1996). Stereoscopic depth constancy depends on the subject’s task.Vision Research,36, 3441–3456.
Glennerster, A., Rogers, B. J., &Bradshaw, M. F. (1998). Cues to viewing distance for stereoscopic depth constancy.Perception,27, 1357–1365.
Goodale, M. A., &Milner, A. D. (1992). Separate visual pathways for perception and action.Trends in Neurosciences,15, 20–25.
Goodale, M. A., Milner, A. D., Jakobson, L. S., &Carey, D. P. (1991). A neurological dissociation between perceiving objects and grasping them.Nature,349, 154–156.
Harway, N. I. (1963). Judgment of distance in children and adults.Journal of Experimental Psychology,65, 385–390.
Hecht, H., van Doorn, A., &Koenderink, J. J. (1999). Compression of visual space in natural scenes and in their photographic counterparts.Perception & Psychophysics,61, 1269–1286.
Heine, L. (1900). Über Orthoskopie oder über die Abhängigkeit relativer Entfernungsschätzungen von der Vorstellung absoluter Entfernung [On “orthoscopy” or on the dependence of relative distance on the representation of absolute distance].Albrecht von Graefe’s Archiv für Ophthalmologie,51, 563–572.
Hoffman, D. D., &Flinchbaugh, B. E. (1982). The interpretation of biological motion.Biological Cybernetics,42, 195–204.
Hogan, N., Kay, B., Fasse, E. D., &Mussa-Ivaldi, F. A. (1990). Haptic illusions: Experiments on human manipulation and perception of “virtual objects.”Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology,55, 925–931.
Hogervorst, M. A., &Eagle, R. A. (1998). Biases in three-dimensional structure-from-motion arise from noise in the early visual system.Proceedings of the Royal Society of London: Series B,265, 1587–1593.
Johnston, E. B. (1991). Systematic distortions of shape from stereopsis.Vision Research,31, 1351–1360.
Johnston, E. B., Cumming, B. G., &Landy, M. S. (1994). Integration of stereopsis and motion shape cues.Vision Research,34, 2259–2275.
Koenderink, J. J., Kappers, A. M. L., Todd, J. T., Norman, J. F., &Phillips, F. (1996). Surface range and attitude probing in stereoscopically presented dynamic scenes.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,22, 869–878.
Koenderink, J. J., &van Doorn, A. J. (1991). Affine structure from motion.Journal of the Optical Society of America A,8, 377–385.
Koenderink, J. J., van Doorn, A. J., &Kappers, A. M. L. (1996). Pictorial surface attitude and local depth comparisons.Perception & Psychophysics,58, 163–173.
Koenderink, J. J., van Doorn, A. J., Kappers, A. M. L., &Todd, J. T. (1997). The visual contour in depth.Perception & Psychophysics,59, 828–838.
Koenderink, J. J., van Doorn, A. J., Kappers, A. M. L., &Todd, J. T. (2001). Ambiguity and the “mental eye” in pictorial relief.Perception,30, 431–448.
Koenderink, J. J., van Doorn, A. J., Kappers, A. M. L., &Todd, J. T. (2002). Pappus in optical space.Perception & Psychophysics,64, 380–391.
Koenderink, J. J., van Doorn, A. J., &Lappin, J. S. (2000). Direct measurement of the curvature of visual space.Perception,29, 69–79.
Landy, M. S., Maloney, L. T., Johnston, E. B., &Young, M. (1995). Measurement and modeling of depth cue combination: In defense of weak fusion.Vision Research,35, 389–412.
Lappin, J. S., &Ahlström, U. B. (1994). On the scaling of visual space from motion—in response to Pizlo and Salach-Golyska.Perception & Psychophysics,55, 235–242.
Lappin, J. S., &Love, S. R. (1992). Planar motion permits perception of metric structure in stereopsis.Perception & Psychophysics,51, 86–102.
Liter, J. C., &Braunstein, M. L. (1998). The relationship of vertical and horizontal velocity gradients in the perception of shape, rotation and rigidity.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,24, 1257–1272.
Liter, J. C., Braunstein, M. L., &Hoffman, D. D. (1993). Inferring structure from motion in two-view and multi-view displays.Perception,22, 1441–1465.
Longuet-Higgins, H. C. (1981). A computer algorithm for reconstructing a scene from two projections.Nature,293, 133–135.
Loomis, J. M., Da Silva, J. A., Fujita, N., &Fukusima, S. S. (1992). Visual space perception and visually directed action.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,18, 906–921.
Loomis, J. M., &Eby, D. W. (1988). Perceiving structure from motion: Failure of shape constancy. InProceedings From the Second International Conference on Computer Vision (pp. 383–391). Washington, DC: IEEE Computer Society Press.
Loomis, J. M., &Eby, D. W. (1989). Relative motion parallax and the perception of structure from motion. InProceedings: Analysis, Motion/ Workshop on Visual Motion (pp. 204–211). Washington, DC: IEEE Computer Society Press.
Loomis, J. M., &Philbeck, J. W. (1999). Is the anisotropy of perceived 3-D shape invariant across scale?Perception & Psychophysics,61, 397–402.
Marr, D. (1982).Vision. San Francisco: Freeman.
Mayhew, J. E., &Longuet-Higgins, H. C. (1982). A computational model of binocular depth perception.Nature,297, 376–378.
Norman, J. F., &Lappin, J. S. (1992). The detection of surface curvatures defined by optical motion.Perception & Psychophysics,51, 386–396.
Norman, J. F., Lappin, J. S., &Norman, H. F. (2000). The perception of length on curved and flat surfaces.Perception & Psychophysics,62, 1133–1145.
Norman, J. F., &Todd, J. T. (1993). The perceptual analysis of structure from motion for rotating objects undergoing affine stretching transformations.Perception & Psychophysics,53, 279–291.
Norman, J. F., &Todd, J. T. (1996). The discriminability of local surface structure.Perception,25, 381–398.
Norman, J. F., &Todd, J. T. (1998). Stereoscopic discrimination of interval and ordinal depth relations on smooth surfaces and in empty space.Perception,27, 257–272.
Norman, J. F., Todd, J. T., Perotti, V. J., &Tittle, J. S. (1996). The visual perception of three-dimensional length.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,22, 173–186.
Norman, J. F., Todd, J. T., &Phillips, F. (1995). The perception of surface orientation from multiple sources of optical information.Perception & Psychophysics,57, 629–636.
Perotti, V. J., Todd, J. T., Lappin, J. S., &Phillips, F. (1998). The perception of surface curvature from optical motion.Perception & Psychophysics,60, 377–388.
Perotti, V. J., Todd, J. T., &Norman, J. F. (1996). The visual perception of rigid motion from constant flow fields.Perception & Psychophysics,58, 666–679.
Peterson, M. A., &Gibson, B. S. (1993). Shape recognition inputs to figure-ground organization in three-dimensional displays.Cognitive Psychology,25, 383–429.
Philbeck, J. W., Loomis, J. M., &Beall, A. C. (1997). Visually perceived location is an invariant in the control of action.Perception & Psychophysics,59, 601–612.
Phillips, F., &Todd, J. T. (1996). The visual perception of local shape.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,22, 930–944.
Phillips, F., Todd, J. T., Koenderink, J. J., &Kappers, A. M. L. (1997). Perceptual localization of surface position.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,23, 1481–1492.
Reid, R. L. (1954). An illusion of movement complementary to the horizontal-vertical illusion.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,6, 107–111.
Richards, W. A. (1985). Structure from stereo and motion.Journal of the Optical Society of America,2, 343–349.
Rieser, J. J., Ashmead, D. H., Talor, C. R., &Youngquist, G. A. (1990). Visual perception and the guidance of locomotion without vision to previously seen targets.Perception,19, 675–689.
Rieser, J. J., Pick, H. L., Jr.,Ashmead, D. H., &Garing, A. E. (1995). Calibration of human locomotion and models of perceptual-motor organization.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,21, 480–497.
Rogers, B. J., &Graham, M. E. (1983). Anisotropies in the perception of three-dimensional surfaces.Science,221, 1409–1411.
Steenuis, F. W., &Goodale, M. A. (1988). The effects of time and distance on accuracy of target directed locomotion: Does an accurate short-term memory for spatial localization exist?Journal of Motor Behavior,20, 399–415.
Thomson, J. A. (1983). Is continuous visual monitoring necessary in visually guided locomotion?Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,9, 427–443.
Thouless, R. H. (1931). Phenomenal regression to the real object: 1.British Journal of Psychology,21, 339–359.
Tittle, J. S., &Braunstein, M. L. (1993). Recovery of 3-D shape from binocular disparity and structure from motion.Perception & Psychophysics,54, 157–169.
Tittle, J. S., Todd, J. T., Perotti, V. J., &Norman, J. F. (1995). Systematic distortion of perceived three-dimensional structure from motion and binocular stereopsis.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,21, 663–678.
Todd, J. T. (1984). The perception of three-dimensional structure from rigid and nonrigid motion.Perception & Psychophysics,36, 97–103.
Todd, J. T. (1985). The perception of structure from motion: Is projective correspondence of moving elements a necessary condition?Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,11, 689–710.
Todd, J. T., &Bressan, P. (1990). The perception of three-dimensional affine structure from minimal apparent motion sequences.Perception & Psychophysics,48, 419–430.
Todd, J. T., Chen, L., &Norman, J. F. (1998). On the relative salience of Euclidean, affine, and topological structure for 3-D form discrimination.Perception,27, 273–282.
Todd, J. T., Koenderink, J. J., van Doorn, A. J., &Kappers, A. M. L. (1996). Effects of changing viewing conditions on the perceived structure of smoothly curved surfaces.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,22, 695–706.
Todd, J. T., &Norman, J. F. (1991). The visual perception of smoothly curved surfaces from minimal apparent motion sequences.Perception & Psychophysics,50, 509–523.
Todd, J. T., &Norman, J. F. (1995). The visual discrimination of relative surface orientation.Perception,24, 855–866.
Todd, J. T., Oomes, A. H., Koenderink, J. J., &Kappers, A. M. L. (2001). On the affine structure of perceptual space.Psychological Science,12, 191–196.
Todd, J. T., &Perotti, V. J. (1999). The visual perception of surface orientation from optical motion.Perception & Psychophysics,61, 1577–1589.
Todd, J. T., &Reichel, F. D. (1989). Ordinal structure in the visual perception and cognition of smoothly curved surfaces.Psychological Review,96, 643–657.
Toye, R. C. (1986). The effect of viewing position on the perceived layout of space.Perception & Psychophysics,40, 85–92.
Turner, J., &Braunstein, M. L. (1995). Size constancy in structure from motion.Perception,24, 1155–1164.
Ullman, S. (1979).The interpretation of visual motion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Von Collani, G. (1979). An analysis of illusion components with Land T-figures in active touch.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,31, 241–248.
Wagner, M. (1985). The metric of visual space.Perception & Psychophysics,38, 483–495.
Werkhoven, P., &van Veen, A. H. C. (1995). Extraction of relief from visual motion.Perception & Psychophysics,57, 645–656.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
This research was supported by NIH Grant R01-Ey12432 and NSF Grant BCS-0079277. Correspondence should be addressed to J. T. Todd,
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Todd, J.T., Norman, J.F. The visual perception of 3-D shape from multiple cues: Are observers capable of perceiving metric structure?. Perception & Psychophysics 65, 31–47 (2003). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03194781
Received:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03194781