Human brain response to visual fatigue caused by stereoscopic depth perception

Abstract

In stereopsis, excessive screen disparity is known as one of the main causes of visual fatigue. Although the visual fatigue caused by stereoscopic depth perception has been reported in a large number of subjective assessments, there has been little effort to measure objective indicators for the visual fatigue. In this study, we investigated the relationship between the visual fatigue and the amount of binocular disparity by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). As a result, we detected strong neuronal activities in frontal eye field (FEF) when the presented visual stimuli had disparities beyond the comfort zone. Since FEF is known to be involved in eye movement control, it also appears to have correlation with the visual fatigue caused by the stereoscopic depth perception.