Seeing Double and Depth with Wheatstone's Stereograms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Charles Wheatstone, in his classic paper on the invention of the stereoscope, concluded "... objects whose pictures do not fall on corresponding points of the two retinae may still appear single" (1838 Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 128 384). Soon after, Ernst Brücke, Alexandre Prévost, David Brewster, Joseph Towne, and Joseph LeConte all published disagreements with this conclusion. LeConte's objections were most frequent and most prolonged. To understand the basis of the disagreements, we conducted three experiments using Wheatstone's original stereograms and found that most stereograms produced depth perception with diplopia, which partially explains the consistency among his critics' conclusions. Most of the criticism at variance with Wheatstone's conclusion was based on research conducted outside Germany. We argue that LeConte's lack of knowledge of the German literature on vision research prevented him from considering investigating Wheatstone's experiment with a stereogram having a smaller disparity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".