Effects of Temporal Association on Recognition Memory

The influence of temporal association on the representation and recognition of objects was investigated. Subjects were presented sequences of novel faces in which the identity of the face changed as the head rotated. The subjects showed a tendency to treat the views as if they were of the same person. The results counter the proposal that object views are recognised simply on the basis of objective, structural components. Instead, they suggest that we are continuously associating views of objects to support later recognition, and that we do so not only on the basis of their physical similarity, but also their correlated appearance in time