by John H. Krantz, Hanover College
© 1997, Peregrine Publishers, Inc., All Rights Reserved
Seeing color is fun, and sometimes important—for instance if you're trying to decide whether a mushroom or berry is poisonous, or if the stoplight is red or green. Facial recognition is simply amazing. Walking down a busy street, we can identify a familiar face almost the instant we see it. But so much of our visual experience involves depth perception. You can't pick that mushroom or berry unless you can judge how far away it is and adjust your hand movements accordingly. You couldn't even take a walk, nor could you drive, without the ability to judge cars' and people's distance from you and your distance from various other people and objects. Perceiving depth, or being able to place important objects in their appropriate place in your visual field, is key.
In this activity, you'll have the opportunity to learn more about depth perception and how binocular and monocular depth cues affect us. Then you'll get the chance to interact with a depth figure changing the depth cues yourself to see what happens and to try your hand at judging depth with varying cues as a subject in a collaborative research project. Finally, you can step into the role of perception researcher to help analyze the data and, in the process, learn a bit about how these people do their work.
But first, let's review some basic information about vision.
