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Abstract

Is human object recognition viewpoint dependent or viewpoint invariant under “everyday” conditions? I. Biederman and P.C. Gerhardstein (1993) argued that viewpoint-invariant mechanisms are used almost exclusively. However, our analysis indicates that (a) their conditions for immediate viewpoint invariance lack the generality to characterize a wide range of recognition phenomena, (b) the extensive body of viewpoint-dependent results cannot be dismissed as processing “by-products” or “experimental artifacts,” and (c) geon structural descriptions cannot coherently account for category recognition, the domain they are intended to explain. The weight of current evidence supports an exemplar-based multiple-views mechanism as an important component of both exemplar-specific and categorical recognition.
*1 This research was supported by U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research Contract F49620-91-J-0169 and by the U.S. Office of Naval Research Contract N00014-93-1-0305. Many of the ideas presented in this article were developed during visits by Michael J. Tarr to the Max-Planck-Institut für Biologische Kybernetik, Tübingen, Germany.*2 This article is based on a more detailed version available as Max-Planck Technical Report No. 3, which may be obtained via anonymous ftp to ftp.mpik-tueb.mpg.de as pub/mpi-memos/tr-003.ps.z.*3 We thank Dan Kersten for his insightful comments and thoughtful advice, Shimon Edelman, David Kriegman, Emanuela Bricolo, William Hayward, Laurie Heller, Pepper Williams, and Alice O'Toole for their comments. We also thank William Hayward for initiating the idea expressed in Figure 3 as well as Pierre Jolicoeur for helpful comments.Corresponding Author Contact Information