Figure 11. Sketch of the model's physiological interpretation.

Disparity is initially encoded by a population tuned entirely to zero vertical disparity. A higher brain area extracts two-dimensional disparity from the activity of this population. The synaptic weights of the projection from the encoding to the decoding population store the mean activity of the encoding population to stimuli with different 2D disparity. For simplicity, synaptic connections onto only two, color-coded, decoding neurons are shown. The call-outs show examples of the 2D disparity tuning for the two populations (encoding: oriented, optimal vertical disparity is zero; decoding: isotropic, optimal vertical disparity may be non-zero).