Abstract
Scene recognition has been found to be sensitive to the orientation of the scene with respect to the stationary observer. Recent studies have shown, however, that observer movement can compensate for changes in visual scene orientation, through a process of spatial updating. Here we investigated whether spatial updating in scene recognition is affected by the encoding or learning modality by examining whether observer movement can also compensate for orientation changes in haptic scene recognition. In experiment 1, we replicated previously reported effects of observer movement on visual scene recognition. In experiment 2, we used the same apparatus as in experiment 1 but here participants were required to learn and recognize the scenes using touch alone. We found a cost in recognition performance with changes in scene orientation relative to the stationary observer. However, when participants could move around the scene to recognize the new orientation, then this cost in recognition performance disappeared. Thus, we found that spatial updating applies to recognition in both the visual and haptic modalities, both of which intrinsically encode the spatial properties of a scene.
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Notes
All the studies reported here were approved by the Trinity College Department of Psychology Ethics Committee.
Although this ISI is longer than in previous studies (e.g. 7 s in Wang and Simon’s 1999 study) this duration was necessary for practical reasons but mainly to allow for the same ISI across experiments 1 and 2. We found no evidence that this increase in ISI between learning and testing affected the spatial updating (see, Hollins and Kelley 1988) although that is not to say that any further increase might indeed disrupt updating.
Although the terms “viewing” and “viewpoint” are more synonymous with visual processing, we prefer to use the same terms of reference across experiments to minimize confusion.
This experiment was based on a between-subjects design, thus our post hoc analysis was conducted using Tukey HSD analysis rather than a Newman–Keuls as in experiment 1.
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Acknowledgements
This research was funded by a Higher Education Authority, PRTLI grant awarded to the Institute of Neuroscience, Trinity College Dublin, of which F.N.N. is a member.
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An erratum to this article can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00221-005-2399-2
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Pasqualotto, A., Finucane, C.M. & Newell, F.N. Visual and haptic representations of scenes are updated with observer movement. Exp Brain Res 166, 481–488 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-005-2388-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-005-2388-5