Active and passive scene recognition across views

Recent evidence suggests that scene recognition across views is impaired wh en an array of objects rotates relative to a stationary observer, but not w hen the observer moves relative to a stationary display [Simons, D.J., Wang , R.F., 1998. Perceiving real-world viewpoint changes. Psychological Scienc e 9, 315-320]. The experiments in this report examine whether the relativel y poorer performance by stationary observers across view changes results fr om a lack of perceptual information for the rotation or from the lack of ac tive control of the perspective change, both of which are present for viewp oint changes. Three experiments compared performance when observers passive ly experienced the view change and when they actively caused the change. Ev en with visual information and active control over the display rotation, ch ange detection performance was still worse for orientation changes than for viewpoint changes. These findings suggest that observers can update a view er-centered representation of a scene when they move to a different viewing position, but such updating does not occur during display rotations even w ith visual and motor information for the magnitude of the change. This expe rimental approach, using arrays of real objects rather than computer displa ys of isolated individual objects, can shed light on mechanisms that allow accurate recognition despite changes in the observer's position and orienta tion. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.