Abstract
Two experiments investigated the influence of qualitative and quantitative shape features on recognition of novel, four-component objects. Quantitatively different objects had different connection angles between the components. Qualitatively different objects had different connection angles and differently shaped components in some of the four positions. Old-new recognition declined less with changes of view for qualitatively different objects (Experiment 1). However, recognition of these objects was made to decline sharply with changes of view if subjects were biased to attend to the connection angles rather than the component shapes (Experiment 2), suggesting that the influence of different features depends on visual experience with those features. These results favor a feature-based model of shape representation that utilizes multiple feature types and that can rely on different features depending on particulars of the objects and the task.
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This research was conducted in partial support of the requirements for the PhD in psychology in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. Financial support at the University of California, Irvine, was provided in part by a dissertation fellowship from the School of Social Sciences and by National Science Foundation Grants DBS-9209973 and SBR-9511198 to Myron Braunstein. Financial support for the preparation of this manuscript was provided by a grant from the Max-Planck-Institut für Biologische Kybernetik, Tübingen, Germany. J.C.L. would like to thank W. Batchelder, M. Braunstein, D. Hoffman, N. Troje, and J. Turner for helpful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript, and J. Bishop for help collecting some of the data. The results of these experiments were presented at the 1995 annual meeting of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology, Ft. Lauderdale, FL.
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Liter, J.C. The contribution of qualitative and quantitative shape features to object recognition across changes of view. Mem Cogn 26, 1056–1067 (1998). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03201183
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03201183