Roles of Visual Area MT in Depth Perception

Abstract

One of the most impressive capacities of the visual system is the ability to infer the three-dimensional structure of the environment from images formed on the two retinas. Although several areas of visual cortex are involved in computing depth, the precise roles of different areas in three-dimensional vision remain unclear. It is important to establish how neural representations of depth in different brain regions are specialized to perform different tasks. This chapter summarizes studies that establish such links between representation and function in visual area MT. The nature of the representation of binocular disparity in MT is first considered, along with the functional roles of MT in coarse and fine depth discrimination. The recently discovered role of area MT in computing depth from motion parallax is then examined. These findings are compared with those from other visual areas to consider possible functional streams of analysis in three-dimensional vision.