Aftereffects of Apparent Motion: The Existence of an AND-Type Binocular System in Human Vision

Abstract

There has been evidence for the existence of a purely binocular system in human vision that acts as an AND gate on information from the two eyes. There also has been evidence for the nonexistence of such a purely binocular system, indicating only the existence of an OR-type binocular system that responds to input from one or both eyes. As a result there are a number of possible explanations for the differing experimental results: the binocular system is an OR-type system only, it is a facilitating OR system that has AND-type characteristics, or it consists of independent OR and AND subsystems. Monocular adaptation, alternating monocular adaptation, or binocular adaptation were used to demonstrate the existence of the different systems, but in none of the previous experiments was the AND-type binocular system activated directly, and the existence of this AND system was deduced mostly because of differences in aftereffect strengths between monocular and binocular test conditions. Experiments are reported in which stimuli that activate the AND-type binocular system explicitly have been used, and the results show that we need the existence of such an AND-type binocular system to account for the results.