Microstructural properties of the vertical occipital fasciculus explain the variability in human stereoacuity

Abstract

Stereopsis is a fundamental visual function that has been studied extensively. However, it is not clear why depth discrimination (stereoacuity) varies more significantly among people than other modalities. Previous studies reported the involvement of both dorsal and ventral visual areas in stereopsis, implying that not only neural computations in cortical areas but also the anatomical properties of white matter tracts connecting those areas can impact stereopsis and stereoacuity. Here, we studied how human stereoacuity relates to white matter properties by combining psychophysics, diffusion MRI (dMRI), and quantitative MRI (qMRI). We performed a psychophysical experiment to measure stereoacuity, and in the same participants we analyzed the microstructural properties of visual white matter tracts based on two independent measurements, dMRI (fractional anisotropy, FA) and qMRI (macromolecular tissue volume; MTV). Microstructural properties along the right vertical occipital fasciculus (VOF), a major tract connecting dorsal and ventral visual areas, were highly correlated with measures of stereoacuity. This result was consistent for both FA and MTV, suggesting that the structural-behavioral relationship reflects differences in neural tissue density, rather than differences in the morphological configuration of fibers. fMRI confirmed that binocular disparity stimuli activated the dorsal and ventral visual regions near VOF endpoints. No other occipital tracts explained the variance in stereoacuity. In addition, the VOF properties were not associated with differences in performance on a different psychophysical task (contrast detection). These series of experiments suggest that stereoscopic depth discrimination performance is, at least in part, constrained by dorso-ventral communication through the VOF.