Abstract

Amounts of transverse chromatic aberration (TCA) and chromostereopsis were measured in normal view for nine subjects at two levels of illumination. Vernier acuities associated with the TCA measurements for a split bichromatic target were worse than those associated with measurements using monochromatic targets at both low and high illuminance. The reduction in vernier acuity can be shown to be due to chromatic aberration because the effect disappears when a Maxwellian view system is aligned with the achromatic axis of the eye. Thus for vernier alignments of bichromatic targets, chromatic aberration introduces both a bias and reduction in acuity. Chromostereopsis will introduce a bias in the depth alignment of targets of differing spectral composition. However when measurements were made of the amount of chromostereopsis for the same subjects, the associated stereoacuity was not reduced as much as expected. This result, combined with the lack of correlation between TCA and chromostereopsis for some subjects, suggests a difference in monocular and binocular processing in hyperacuity tasks.

© 1990 Optical Society of America