View combination in scene recognition

Becoming familiar with an environment requires the ability to integrate spatial information from different views. We provide evidence that view combination, a mechanism believed to underlie the ability to recognize novel views of familiar objects, is also used to recognize coherent, real-world scenes. In two experiments, we trained participants to recognize a real-world scene from two perspectives. When the angular difference between the learned views was relatively small, the participants subsequently recognized novel views from locations between the learned views about as well as they recognized the learned views and better than novel views situated outside of the shortest distance between the learned views. In contrast, with large angles between training views, all the novel views were recognized less well than the trained views. These results extend the view combination approach to scenes and are difficult to reconcile with models proposing that scenes are recognized by transforming them to match only the nearest stored view.