Abstract
One of the most fascinating phenomena in stereopsis is the profound hysteresis effect reported by Fender and Julesz (1967), in which the depth percept persisted with increasing disparity long past the point at which depth was recovered with decreasing disparity. To control retinal disparity without vergence eye movements, they stabilized the stimuli on the retinas with an eye tracker. I now report that stereo hysteresis can be observed directly in printed stereograms simply by rotating the image. As the stereo image rotates, the horizontal disparities rotate to become vertical, then horizontal with inverted sign, and then vertical again before returning to the original orientation. The depth shows an interesting popout effect, almost as though the depth was turning on and off rapidly, despite the inherently sinusoidal change in the horizontal disparity vector. This stimulus was generated electronically in a circular format so that the random-dot field could be dynamically replaced, eliminating any cue to cyclorotation. Noise density was scaled with eccentricity to fade out the stimulus near fixation. For both the invariant and the dynamic noise, profound hysteresis of several seconds delay was found in six observers. This was far longer than the reaction time to respond to changes in disparity, which was less than a second. Purely horizontal modulation of disparity to match the horizontal vector component of the disparity rotation did not show the popout effect, which thus seems to be a function of the interaction between horizontal and vertical disparities and may be attributable to depth interpolation processes.