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Abstract:
Object motion, eg depth-rotation, provides visual information that might be useful for the reconstruction of an object's 3-D structure, hence increasing the recognition likelihood of any given moving object. Our aim is to demonstrate that object motion can, in itself, serve as an independent cue to object identity without particular recourse to form-retrieval processes. In this study, we used novel amoeboid objects that transformed nonrigidly over time. Two experiments are reported on the learnt recognition of such stimuli. During an initial study phase, participants learnt to identify these objects. At test, participants were either presented with an old/new recognition task (experiment 1) or with a two-alternative forced-choice task (experiment 2). Here, learnt stimuli were presented in either the studied sequence of shape transformations, or the reverse order. Although the shapes shown were the same in both instances, the overall findings indicate that participants performed significantly better in recognising the learnt objects when the same shapes were presented in the learnt sequence, than when they were presented in reverse sequence. If object motion facilitates recognition of the stimulus solely by contributing to the recovery of its form, the sequence of non-rigid transformation would not be relevant to its representation. Nonetheless, these findings suggest that human observers do not merely remember a visual object as a collection of different shapes. Instead, observers are also sensitive to how these shapes transform over time.
