ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a few triumphs and a great many frustrations in studying visual depth perception. It reviews a number of areas related to depth perception, trying to show some of the problems, many of them unexpected and frustrating, that at times give the researcher the feeling of being “arched over by a laughing heaven.” Every laboratory is afflicted with its set of gremlins, its own laughing heaven. An excellent review of the multisensory nature of depth perception is provided in a paper by E. Cullen. The D. C. DeHardt effect can be shown with human infants, but the relative importance of texture and motion parallax cannot be determined. Increasing visual depth does tend to diminish the DeHardt effect for the rat. The weakness of stripes or straight contours does have some touch points in research on infant and adult perception.
