Manipulating and Recognizing Virtual Objects: Where the Action Is Abstract In an earlier report (Harman, Humphrey, &

Goodale, 1999), we demonstrated that observers who actively rotated three-dimensional novel objects on a computer screen later showed faster visual recognition of these objects than did observers who had passively viewed exactly the same sequence of images of these virtual objects. In Experiment 1 of the present study we showed that compared to passive viewing, active exploration of three-dimensional object structure led to faster performance on a “mental rotation ” task involv-ing the studied objects. In addition, we examined how much time observers concentrated on particular views during active exploration. As we found in the previous report, they spent most of their time looking at the “side ” and “front ” views (“plan ” views) of the objects, rather than the three-quarter or intermediate views