Diwadkar, V. A., & McNamara, T. P. (1997). Viewpoint dependence in scene recognition. Psychological Science, 8, 302-307.


Two experiments investigated the viewpoint dependence of spatial memories. In Experiment 1, participants learned the locations of objects on a desktop from a single perspective, and then took part in a recognition test; test scenes included familiar and novel views of the layout. Recognition latency was a linear function of the angular distance between a test view and the study view. In Experiment 2, participants studied a layout from a single view, and then learned to recognize the layout from three additional training views. A final recognition test showed that the study view and the training views were represented in memory, and that latency was a linear function of the angular distance to the nearest study or training view. These results indicate that interobject spatial relations are encoded in a viewpoint dependent manner, and that recognition of novel views requires normalization to the most similar representation in memory. These findings parallel recent results in visual object recognition.