Well, what we're going to see is that

there are a whole raft of cues that,

give us this sense of monocular distance,
and
this diagram shows you some of these, not
all of them but certainly some of them.
And the most obvious one,
I suppose, is perspective.
So, when we look at
the world with one eye, or
with two, for that matter, we are seeing
things in, in geometrical projection,
which means that objects
that are close by us.
And in this diagram are all of these balls
are taken to be the same physical size.
Objects that are near project on
the retina as a subtending a large angle.
And as they get further away they
subtend a smaller and smaller angle.
That's the inverse relationship
between size of projection and
distance from the observer.
And that's called a perspective, and
obviously when you draw something,
you need to draw it in perspective
if you want it to look realistic.
But that, sense of perspective
gives us a strong binocular cue
as to how far away things are in
the world in which we have to act.
A second rather obvious phenomenon
that's monocular is occlusion.
So it's obvious and presumably we learn
all of these things in our, our lifetimes.
It's unlikely that we
are born with this knowledge.
Although it certainly is the possibility
of being set up to learn it quite quickly.
When one object such as the ball in
the foreground occludes another ball
in the background.
Well, we know the object in
the foreground is closer to close to us,
than the object in the background.
A third cue is what's
called area perspective.
And when artists want to draw
something that's far away.
And signify that to an observer they make
the distant mountains bluish, for example.
And the reason for that is when we see
things that are far away, they look bluer.
And we should have a sense of why that is.
There's simply more sky
interposed between you and
a distant object than you and
a nearby object.
The reason the sky is blue is
because short wavelength light is

scattered in a different
way by the molecules and
particles in the atmosphere and
reaches us on the surface of the earth and
the sky applies whether we
are looking straight up.
Or a far away distant
object on the horizon.
The fourth cue, and this isn't a complete
list, but it gives you an idea
that there are a number of different cues,
it's called motion parallax.
That's kind of a fancy
somewhat forbidding term, but
it refers to something that's
just as simple as the other cues.
And that is that when you
move your head back and
forth, the objects that are in
the foreground move more than
the objects that are in the background
on your retina and in your perception.
So that back and
forth head movement, and the effect of
the different motion that near by and
distant objects are caused to have by
that motion is called motion parallax.
And it's another cue to
how far away something is.
All these things
are monocularly available.
And as I say it's not a complete list.
But it certainly gives you the idea that
there are many factors that contribute to
our sense of distance seen with one eye.
And that these are in all probability,
something that by and
large we learn in the course of life.
Well I want to make the point
that just as in the case of
all the other aspects of visual
perception that we've been talking about.
What we see doesn't correspond
to physical measurements,
this is a theme that recurs here just
as well as in all the other aspects of
reception that we've been discussing.
And, this set of diagrams, shows you
some of the phenomenology, of that.
each, each of these panels gives
a specific name to the phenomenon but
let me just describe them to you.
In each case the, red dot,
is the perceived distance of the object.
And the gray dot is the actual
physical measured distance of
the object in psycho physical testing.
So in this first case,
called the specific distance tendency,
if you're looking straight

ahead at eye level.

You perceive things in
the medium distance As
being further away than
they are physically.
The second of these phenomena
is the distance tendency, and
this is referring to the fact that when
you look at two objects that are different
distances from you as an observer,
this object and this object, for example.
Observers tend to see them, and
report being the same distance away.
So, again, this is perception,
equidistant, but
the physical reality is that
they are differently distant.
This third phenomenon is
called the distance perception
at eye level phenomenon.
And it is that, again, if you look at,
objects at, at eye level,
that are relatively near, as in this case,
and relatively far, this more or less
follows from the equi-distance tendency
and from the specific distance tendency.
But it is a little bit different
in concept, then you tend to
see the near object is further away and
the far object is nearer too.
You would gain a discrepancy between
the physical measurements of distance and
the perceived distance.
Finally, there is the difference of
objects that are seen on the ground.
People have studied these things.
Psycho physicists have come
up with the evidence for
these things that I'm telling
you over many decades.
And when you look at objects that are on
a level surface that are further away from
you progressively as
these three objects here.
Then you see, tend to see them as,
raised from the ground to different
degrees that is a function of distance.
That's how to perceive distance or
objects on the ground.
So, this is just to make the point,
not to belabor you with these kind of
arcane phenomenon but
to make the point that.
Once again, what you see is very
different from what exists physically,
in the case of an ocular
distance perception,
as in all of the other things
that we've been talking about.