Elsevier

Cognition

Volume 95, Issue 1, February 2005, Pages 73-93
Cognition

Orientation-invariant object recognition: evidence from repetition blindness

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2004.02.006Get rights and content

Abstract

The question of whether object recognition is orientation-invariant or orientation-dependent was investigated using a repetition blindness (RB) paradigm. In RB, the second occurrence of a repeated stimulus is less likely to be reported, compared to the occurrence of a different stimulus, if it occurs within a short time of the first presentation. This failure is usually interpreted as a difficulty in assigning two separate episodic tokens to the same visual type. Thus, RB can provide useful information about which representations are treated as the same by the visual system. Two experiments tested whether RB occurs for repeated objects that were either in identical orientations, or differed by 30, 60, 90, or 180°. Significant RB was found for all orientation differences, consistent with the existence of orientation-invariant object representations. However, under some circumstances, RB was reduced or even eliminated when the repeated object was rotated by 180°, suggesting easier individuation of the repeated objects in this case. A third experiment confirmed that the upside-down orientation is processed more easily than other rotated orientations. The results indicate that, although object identity can be determined independently of orientation, orientation plays an important role in establishing distinct episodic representations of a repeated object, thus enabling one to report them as separate events.

Section snippets

Experiment 1

Experiment 1 investigated whether RB occurs for two repeated objects that were either in identical orientations (both upright) or differed by 30, 60, 90 or 180°. The task required participants to report three pictures presented in rapid succession, for 100 ms each. The critical items were the first picture (C1, or critical item 1) and the third picture (C2, or critical item 2); these were either the same object (repeated condition) or different objects (non-repeated condition). The intervening

Experiment 2

This experiment investigated whether increasing the orientation processing demands of the task would make it more difficult for subjects to use orientation as a way of differentiating two repeated objects, resulting in robust RB even for objects rotated by 180°. The orientation processing demands of the task were increased by presenting the intervening item (that presented between C1 and C2) rotated away from the upright; the experiment was otherwise identical to Experiment 1. This means that,

Experiment 3

The results of the first two experiments suggest that the upright (0°) and upside-down (180°) orientations may be processed more easily than other orientations (30, 60, 90°). In this experiment, we investigated whether the accuracy with which people explicitly judge the orientation of a briefly presented object depends on the orientation of the object. Since there was no evidence from 1 Experiment 1, 2 Experiment 2 of any particular differences amongst the orientations of 30, 60 and 90°, in

General discussion

The present study used a RB paradigm to investigate whether the object representations generated outside conscious awareness are orientation-dependent or orientation-invariant. The principal finding was that RB occurred across changes in object orientation ranging from 30 to 180°. These results replicate and extend those reported by Kanwisher et al. (1999) and provide support for the suggestion that these object representations are orientation-invariant. Our results also revealed that

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by an Early Career Researcher Grant from Macquarie University. Irina Harris was supported by an ARC Australian Post-doctoral Fellowship and Paul Dux was supported by an Australian Post-graduate Award. We thank Leila Petit and Stacey Kuan for assistance in running the experiments; Justin Harris, Mike Corballis and Steve Mondy for discussion of the research and comments on the manuscript; and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticisms.

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