| Abstract: | To explore whether effects observed in human object recognition represent fundamental properties of visual perception that are general across species, the authors trained pigeons (Columba livia) and humans to discriminate between pictures of 3-dimensional objects that differed in shape. Novel pictures of the depth-rotated objects were then tested for recognition. Across conditions, the object pairs contained either 0, 1, 3, or 5 distinctive pails. Pigeons showed viewpoint dependence in all object-part conditions, and their performance declined systematically with degree of rotation from the nearest training view. Humans showed viewpoint invariance for novel rotations between the training views but viewpoint dependence for novel rotations outside the training views. For humans, but not pigeons, viewpoint dependence was weakest in the 1-part condition. The authors discuss the results in terms of structural and multiple-view models of object recognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
