Liu Taosheng
Department of Psychology, New York University, New York 10003, USA.
Perception. 2007;36(9):1320-33. doi: 10.1068/p5778.
How humans recognize objects remains a contentious issue in current research on high-level vision. Here, I test the proposal by Wallis and Bülthoff (1999 Trends in Cognitive Sciences 3 22-31) suggesting that object representations can be learned through temporal association of multiple views of the same object. Participants first studied image sequences of novel, three-dimensional objects in a study block. On each trial, the images were from either an orderly sequence of depth-rotated views of the same object (SS), a scrambled sequence of those views (SR), or a sequence of different objects (RR). Recognition memory was assessed in a following test block. A within-object advantage was consistently observed --greater accuracy in the SR than the RR condition in all four experiments, greater accuracy in the SS than the RR condition in two experiments. Furthermore, spatiotemporal coherence did not produce better recognition than temporal coherence alone (similar or less accuracy in the SS compared to the SR condition). These results suggest that the visual system can use temporal regularity to build invariant object representations, via the temporal-association mechanism.
在当前关于高级视觉的研究中，人类如何识别物体仍然是一个有争议的问题。在此，我对沃利斯和比尔托夫（1999年，《认知科学趋势》第3卷，第22 - 31页）提出的观点进行了测试，该观点认为物体表征可以通过同一物体多个视图的时间关联来学习。参与者首先在一个学习阶段研究新颖的三维物体的图像序列。在每次试验中，图像要么来自同一物体深度旋转视图的有序序列（SS）、这些视图的打乱序列（SR），要么来自不同物体的序列（RR）。在随后的测试阶段评估识别记忆。在所有四个实验中均一致观察到物体内部优势——在SR条件下的准确率高于RR条件，在两个实验中SS条件下的准确率高于RR条件。此外，时空连贯性并没有比单独的时间连贯性产生更好的识别效果（与SR条件相比，SS条件下的准确率相似或更低）。这些结果表明，视觉系统可以通过时间关联机制利用时间规律性来构建不变的物体表征。
