Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A fundamental challenge in object recognition is torecognize an image when it is projected across differentretinal locations, an ability known as translation tolerance.Although the human visual system can overcome thischallenge, the mechanisms responsible remain largelyunexplained. The ‘trained-tolerance’ approach holds thatan object must be experienced across different retinallocations to achieve translation tolerance. Previous studieshave supported this approach by showing that the visualsystem struggles to generalize recognition of novelobjects to translations as small as 2° of visual angle. Thepresent paper outlines a series of eyetracking studies thatshow novel objects can be recognized at translations as faras 18° from the trained retinal location, challenging thestandard account of translation tolerance in neuroscienceand psychology.