P2-1: Visual Short-Term Memory Lacks Sensitivity to Stereoscopic Depth Changes but is Much Sensitive to Monocular Depth Changes

Depth from both binocular disparity and monocular depth cues presumably is one of most salient features that would characterize a variety of visual objects in our daily life. Therefore it is plausible to expect that human vision should be good at perceiving objects' depth change arising from binocular disparities and monocular pictorial cues. However, what if the estimated depth needs to be remembered in visual short-term memory (VSTM) rather than just perceived? In a series of experiments, we asked participants to remember depth of items in an array at the beginning of each trial. A set of test items followed after the memory array, and the participants were asked to report if one of the items in the test array have changed its depth from the remembered items or not. The items would differ from each other in three different depth conditions: (1) stereoscopic depth under binocular disparity manipulations, (2) monocular depth under pictorial cue manipulations, and (3) both stereoscopic and monocular depth. The accuracy of detecting depth change was substantially higher in the monocular condition than in the binocular condition, and the accuracy in the both-depth condition was moderately improved compared to the monocular condition. These results indicate that VSTM benefits more from monocular depth than stereoscopic depth, and further suggests that storage of depth information into VSTM would require both binocular and monocular information for its optimal memory performance.