Active and passive object recognition in a virtual environment

Abstract

In an earlier report (Harman, Humphrey, and Goodale, 1999), we demonstrated that observers who actively rotated three-dimensional novel objects on a computer screen by means of a track ball 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 the present experiment, we report evidence that under very different viewing and manipulation conditions, active exploration of objects facilitated object recognition compared to passive viewing. Observers studied objects while immersed in a virtual reality CAVE (fakespace). For viewing of half of the study objects, observers were able to rotate the objects in a way that mapped onto normal object movement very naturally. Specifically, to rotate the virtual objects observers rotated a real block that they held in their hands. Rotations of the real block about any axis in 3-D space were mapped onto identical rotations of the virtual object. The other half of the study objects were viewed passively without any control of the rotations. During a test session, participants recognized three-dimensional static images faster if they had actively rotated those objects during a study session than if they had simply viewed them passively. This is the first study to demonstrate that active manipulation of novel objects in virtual reality environments facilitates subsequent recognition.

Footnotes

 

Footnotes

 Research supported by the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council and by the Canadian Institute for Health Research.