Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The internal representations of three dimensional objectswithin visual memory are only partially understood. Previousresearch suggests that 3D object perception is viewpoint de-pendent, and that the visual system stores viewpoint perspec-tives in a biased manner. The aim of this project was to ob-tain detailed estimates of the distributions of 3D object viewsin shared human memory. We devised a novel experimentalparadigm based on transmission chains to investigate memorybiases for the 3D orientation of objects. We found that memorytends to be biased towards orthogonal diagrammatic perspec-tives aligned with the ends of the standard basis for a set ofcommon 3D objects, and that these biases are strongest for sideviews as well as top or bottom views for a small set of bilater-ally symmetric objects. Finally, we found that views sampledfrom the modes were easier to categorize in a recognition task.