Stereo or '3D' vision is an important but costly process seen in several evolutionarily distinct lineages including primates, birds and insects. Many selective advantages could have led to the evolution of stereo vision, including range finding, camouflage breaking and estimation of object size. In this paper, we investigate the possibility that stereo vision enables praying mantises to estimat...

G. P. Bingham and C. C. Pagano (1998, The necessity of a perception/action approach to definite distance perception: Monocular distance perception to guide reaching. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 24, 145-168) argued that metric space perception should be investigated using relevant action measures because calibration is an intrinsic component of perceptio...

Three experiments investigated auditory distance perception under natural listening conditions in a large open field. Targets varied in egocentric distance from 3 to 16 m. By presenting visual targets at these same locations on other trials, we were able to compare visual and auditory distance perception under similar circumstances. In some experimental conditions, observers made verbal reports...

Golf holes look larger to golfers who are playing better than others, and hills look steeper to people who are fatigued from a long run-or so claims the action-specific account of perception. According to this account, spatial perception of slant, distance, and size is influenced by the perceiver's ability to perform actions such as walking, throwing, or grasping. This claim is based on empiric...

A recent controversy in the field of depth perception has highlighted an important aspect of model testing concerning a model's complexity, defined as the prior propensity of the model to fit arbitrary data sets. The present article introduces an index of complexity, called the mean minimum distance, defined as the average squared distance between an arbitrary data point and the prediction rang...

Monocular perception of egocentric distance via optic flow generated by head movement toward a target was investigated with a helmet-mounted video camera and display. Ability to perceive target distance was assessed with 2 response measures: verbal reports and reaches. Systematic and random errors differed as a function of the response measure. Verbal estimates of targets within and beyond reac...

A method for synthesizing near-field head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) from far-field HRTFs measured using an acoustic point-source of sound is presented. Near-field HRTFs are synthesized by applying an analytic function describing the change in the transfer function when the location of a sound source changes from the far-field to the near-field: the distance variation function (DVF). Th...