Perceiving self-motion in depth: The role of stereoscopic motion and changing-size cues

During self-motions, different patterns of optic flow are presented to the left and right eyes. Previous research has, however, focused mainly on the self-motion information contained in a single pattern of optic flow. The present experiments investigated the role that binocular disparity plays in the visual perception of self-motion, showing that the addition of stereoscopic cues to optic flow significantly improves forward linear vection in central vision. Improvements were also achieved by adding changingsize cues to sparse (but not dense) flow patterns. These findings showed that assumptions in the heading literature that stereoscopic cues facilitate self-motion only when the optic flow has ambiguous depth ordering do not apply to vection. Rather, it was concluded that both stereoscopic and changingsize cues provide additional motion-in-depth information that is used in perceiving self-motion.