Various stereoscopic demonstrations are presented which indicate that visual texture discrimination is based on processes which occur after, or at the same time as, the binocular combination of images from the two eyes. Monocularly invisible texture regions can become apparent, and monocularly visible regions can be hidden, by the processes of binocular fusion.
Recent discoveries of nonlinear perceptual analyzers in effortless texture discrimination cast serious doubt on the usefulness of Fourier image decompositions to describe suprathreshold visual-texture perception. We now explain the meaning of these results.