Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Several computational models have recently been proposed to define or describe visual representations. Is it reasonable to accept these models as plausible explanations of human visual processing? One way to address this question is to examine whether the models are affected by variables that have been shown to affect human visual analogical reasoning. Two such variables are stimulus complexity and differences in orientation of stimuli that must be compared. Unfortunately, the experiments that have been used to uncover these effects typically use stimuli that are too complex to be easily defined within the structure of computational models. In the present papa- this problem is resolved by producing the standard set of results for complexity and orientation with a set of easily defined stimuli. We therefore see this work as a preliminary step in the comparison of human and computational models of visual processing. We report results of a human experiment investigating mental rotation and complexity effects as well as an attempt to mimic these data with an implementation of one computational model.