Facilitation by view combination and coherent motion in dynamic object recognition

We compared the effect of motion cues on people’s ability to: (1) recognize dynamic objects by combining information from more than one view and (2) perform more efficiently on views that followed the global direction of the trained views. Participants learned to discriminate two objects that were either structurally similar or distinct and that were rotating in depth in either a coherent or scrambled motion sequence. The Training views revealed 60° of the object, with a center 30° segment missing. For similar stimuli only, there was a facilitative effect of motion: Performance in the coherent condition was better on views following the training views than on equidistant preceding views. Importantly, the viewpoint between the two training viewpoints was responded to more efficiently than either the Pre- or Post-Training viewpoints for both the coherent and scrambled condition. The results indicate that view combination and processing coherent motion cues may occur through different processes.