Translational and reflectional priming invariance: a retrospective

Biederman and Cooper (1991a) showed that the presentation of a briefly presented image of an object at one position in the visual field facilitated its identification, as assessed by naming speed and accuracy, several minutes later. The facilitation was unaffected by a translation or a reflection of the stimulus. A component of this priming was visual rather than basic-level conceptual or lexical in that there was less facilitation for an object with the same name (and basic-level class) but a different shape. The invariance of priming to view variables has stood up well over the years and appears to be a general phenomenon--as long as the original structural description can be readily resolved--in that it has also been observed for variations in size and orientation in depth. Although priming was unaffected by a change in position, we documented that there was explicit memory for the position (and orientation and size) of the stimulus. The existence of two forms of representation from the identical stimulus presentation--one invariant and the other dependent on view variables--poses a challenge as to what can be concluded about view invariance from single-unit activity.