Do Animals Recognize Pictures as Representations of 3D Objects?

The focus article warns about the risks of assuming that animals see picture-object correspondence. For observers to recognize objects in pictures or videos, 2D visual inputs have to be matched to the representations of the real objects. Pictures and videos lack some important characteristics of the objects in the real world, e.g., self-induced motion and 3D cues. Evidence has been mixed on the issue of whether animals, particularly birds, are able to derive 3D structure from the pictorial depth cues in 2D images. The present paper returns to the issue addressed by the focus article to consider depth perception in 2D pictorial stimuli.