Binocular Vision - Stereopsis

Stereopsis

Stereopsis is an ability to make fine depth discriminations from parallax provided by the two eye's different positions on the head. There are two sorts: quantitative stereopsis, in which the depth seen is very similar to the actual depth of the object being judged, and qualitative stereopsis, in which the depth is correctly nearer or farther than the fixation point but the amount of depth does not grow with distance of the object from the fixation point. Quantitative stereopsis holds for small distances from the fixation plane (approximately within Panum's fusional area); qualitative stereopsis holds for larger distances from the fixation plane (outside of Panum's fusional area). Eventually an object can be moved so far from the fixation plane that there is no sense of depth of the double image – instead they appear to be on the fixation plane.