In learning to draw or paint, it helps to have a sense of composition, color and originality.

And depth perception? Maybe not so much, neuroscientists are now suggesting. Instead, so-called stereo blindness — in which the eyes are out of alignment so the brain cannot fuse the images from each one — may actually be an asset.

Looking at the world through one eye at a time automatically “flattens the scene,” said Margaret S. Livingstone, an expert on vision and the brain at Harvard Medical School who helped carry out a study on stereo vision.

That appears to give people with stereo blindness a natural advantage in translating the richly three-dimensional world onto a flat two-dimensional canvas, she said. They use monocular depth cues like motion, relative size, shadows and overlapping figures to stimulate a 3-D world.

For one experiment in the study, published in the journal Psychological Science, the researchers measured stereoscopic ability in 403 students from two art schools known for an emphasis on representational rendering and in 190 non-art majors at a university with similar tuition.