University of Southampton
Department of Psychology

The Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory

Two experiments were conducted to examine the visual-spatial processing of objects presented from canonical and non-canonical viewpoints. In the first experiment, participants recognized objects and compared them to object-name probes. In a previous study, Kosslyn et al. (1994) suggested that additional top-down processing was involved in recognizing objects from non-canonical viewpoints as such recognition selectively activated the frontal cortex (among other areas), which was also reflected in increased RT. We used the same stimuli as Kosslyn et al., but to ensure that the canonical representations were not activated prior to the presentation of the visual object (as in Kosslyn et al.'s study), the participants in our study were first shown the objects and only then the comparison object-name probes were presented. We found that even if the canonical representations are not activated prior to recognition, more time is required to process the non-canonical viewpoints. In our second experiment, using the same stimuli, participants judged the spatial position from which the stimuli were viewed. Results showed that additional processing is required to spatially process the non-canonical viewpoints, suggesting that they need to be compared and normalized to the canonical representation prior to making the spatial judgment.

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