Temporal correlations in presentation order during learning affects human object recognition

The view-based approach to object recognition supposes that objects are stored as a series of associated views. Although representation of these views as combinations of 2-D features allows generalisation to similar views, it remains unclear how very different views might be associated together to allow recognition from any viewpoint. One cue present in the real world other than spatial similarity, is that we usually experience different objects in temporally constrained, coherent order, and not as randomly ordered snapshots. In a series of recent neural-network simulations, Wallis and Baddeley (1997 Neural Computation 9 883 - 894) describe how the association of views on the basis of temporal as well as spatial correlations is both theoretically advantageous and biologically plausible. We describe an experiment aimed at testing their hypothesis in human object-recognition learning. We investigated recognition performance of faces previously presented in sequences. These sequences consisted of five views of five different people's faces, presented in orderly sequence from left to right profile in 45° steps. According to the temporal-association hypothesis, the visual system should associate the images together and represent them as different views of the same person's face, although in truth they are images of different people's faces. In a same/different task, subjects were asked to say whether two faces seen from different viewpoints were views of the same person or not. In accordance with theory, discrimination errors increased for those faces seen earlier in the same sequence as compared with those faces which were not (