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Abstract

The spatiotemporal pattern projected by a moving object is specific to that object, as it
depends on both the object’s shape and its dynamics. Previous research has shown that observers learn to make use of this spatiotemporal signature to recognize dynamic faces
and objects. In two experiments, we assessed the extent to which the structural similarity of the objects and the presence of spatiotemporal noise affect how these signatures are learned and subsequently used in recognition. Observers first learned to identify novel structurally distinctive or structurally similar objects that rotated with a particular motion.
At test, each learned objects moved with its studied motion or with a nonstudied motion. In the nonstudied motion condition we manipulated either dynamic information alone (Experiment 1) or both static and dynamic information (Experiment 2). Across both
experiments we found that changing an object’s learned motion impaired recognition performance when 3D shape was similar or when the visual input was noisy during learning. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that observers use learned spatiotemporal signatures and that such information becomes progressively more important as shape information becomes less reliable.