Do viewpoint-dependent mechanisms generalize across members of a class?

Evidence for viewpoint-specific image-based object representations have been collected almost entirely using exemplar-specific recognition tasks. Recent results, however, implicate image-based processes in more categorical tasks, for instance when objects contain qualitatively different 3D parts. Although such discriminations approximate class-level recognition, they do not establish whether image-based representations can support generalization across members of an object class. This issue is critical to any theory of recognition, in that one hallmark of human visual competence is the ability to recognize unfamiliar instances of a familiar class. The present study addresses this question by testing whether viewpoint-specific representations for some members of a class facilitate the recognition of other members of that class. Experiment 1 demonstrates that familiarity with several members of a class of novel 3D objects generalizes in a viewpoint-dependent manner to cohort objects from the same class. Experiment 2 demonstrates that this generalization is based on the degree of familiarity and the degree of geometrical distinctiveness for particular viewpoints. Experiment 3 demonstrates that this generalization is restricted to visually-similar objects rather than all objects learned in a given context. These results support the hypothesis that image-based representations are viewpoint dependent, but that these representations generalize across members of perceptually-defined classes. More generally, these results provide evidence for a new approach to image-based recognition in which object classes are represented as clusters of visually-similar viewpoint-specific representations.