Eye movements enhance stereoscopic 3D vision
Abstract
In moving organisms, sensory systems must recover spatial properties of the world from signals continually altered by their own movements. These self-generated temporal signals carry useful spatial information across various sensory modalities, but it remains unclear whether they also contribute to fine visual computations traditionally thought to rely on the spatial structure of the retinal images. In humans, stereopsis estimates depth from differences between the images in the two eyes with extraordinary precision. Yet fixational eye movements continually alter these differences, causing binocular disparity to fluctuate over time. Here we show that stereopsis critically depends on these oculomotor-induced input changes. Using high-resolution binocular eye tracking and gaze-contingent display control, we selectively manipulated the retinal consequences of the differential (vergence) and common (version) components of binocular eye movements. Suppressing eye-movement-induced disparity modulations severely impairs stereopsis, even when retinal image motion in each eye is preserved. Across viewing conditions, the strength of disparity modulations closely predicts performance, regardless of whether they are generated by vergence or version. These findings establish stereopsis as a spatiotemporal process and reveal disparity dynamics induced by eye movements as a critical resource for fine depth perception.
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BibTeX
@misc{li2026movements,
title = {{Eye movements enhance stereoscopic 3D vision}},
author = {Y. Howard Li and Jie Z. Wang and Janis Intoy and Jonathan D. Victor and Michele Rucci},
howpublished = {bioRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.64898/2026.10.20.760568},
url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.10.20.760568v1},
note = {CC BY-NC-ND},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Eye movements enhance stereoscopic 3D vision
AU - Y. Howard Li
AU - Jie Z. Wang
AU - Janis Intoy
AU - Jonathan D. Victor
AU - Michele Rucci
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/20
PB - bioRxiv
DO - 10.64898/2026.10.20.760568
UR - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.10.20.760568v1
AB - In moving organisms, sensory systems must recover spatial properties of the world from signals continually altered by their own movements. These self-generated temporal signals carry useful spatial information across various sensory modalities, but it remains unclear whether they also contribute to fine visual computations traditionally thought to rely on the spatial structure of the retinal images. In humans, stereopsis estimates depth from differences between the images in the two eyes with extraordinary precision. Yet fixational eye movements continually alter these differences, causing binocular disparity to fluctuate over time. Here we show that stereopsis critically depends on these oculomotor-induced input changes. Using high-resolution binocular eye tracking and gaze-contingent display control, we selectively manipulated the retinal consequences of the differential (vergence) and common (version) components of binocular eye movements. Suppressing eye-movement-induced disparity modulations severely impairs stereopsis, even when retinal image motion in each eye is preserved. Across viewing conditions, the strength of disparity modulations closely predicts performance, regardless of whether they are generated by vergence or version. These findings establish stereopsis as a spatiotemporal process and reveal disparity dynamics induced by eye movements as a critical resource for fine depth perception.
SN - 2692-8205
ER -