Object Naming

The impact of object naming on object drawing confirms an association between object categorisation and viewpoint-independence in longer-term visual remembering. Adult participants viewed a novel object from a viewpoint from which it would not normally be drawn from memory. The experimenter either labelled the object with a novel count noun (“Look at this dax”) or did not (“Look at this object”). Participants then drew the object from immediate, short-term, or longer-term memory, with no constraints being imposed on how they should depict the object. When the object was named at presentation, but not otherwise, the transition from immediate to longer-term remembering increased the likelihood that the object was depicted from a viewpoint from which it had not been seen. This trend was reversed when participants were asked to depict the object in the orientation in which it had appeared to them. These results are discussed in relation to an account of the conditions under which visual category representations become established and may be used preferentially over image-like visual representations