Learning an object from multiple views enhances its recognition in an orthogonal rotational axis in pigeons

In the natural environment, most objects are seen from several different viewpoints. We explored the nature of recognition after training with multiple views and compared it to recognition after training with only one view. Pigeons were taught with either five views or one view of each of four single-geon objects. Pigeons trained with five views responded more accurately to novel views of an object than did pigeons trained with only one view. This result held even when the novel views came from a rotational axis that was orthogonal to the training axis. These results do not accord with recognition processes involving mental rotation or direct interpolation. Pigeons trained with five views may have formed a view-invariant representation [Psychol. Rev. 94 (1987) 115; Vision Res. 39 (1999) 2885]; alternatively, they may have acquired a more detailed shape space of the objects in which to measure object similarity [Representation and recognition in vision, MIT Press, MA, 1999], or learned to attend to a broader range of features of each object [J. Exp. Anal. Behav. 54 (1990) 69].