When movement patterns turn into events: Implications for the recognition of spatial configurations from different viewpoints

Abstract

In the present paper, we examine the spatial representation of dynamic scenes. Particularly, we focus on the question whether recognition performance is viewpoint dependent or viewpoint invariant. In two experiments, the processing of events with regard to their spatial dimension was investigated. Dynamic scenes were varied in a manner that either retained or suppressed their event characteristics. It could be shown that the meaningful variant of the scene led to a viewpoint independent recognition performance, whereas the meaningless variant led to a viewpoint dependent recognition performance. Taken together, the experiments demonstrate that the event character of dynamic scenes enables viewers to encode the scene in a highly economic way and, therefore, has profound implications for the quality of spatial representation in terms of its abstract, viewpoint independent character.

Keywords:

• Dynamic scenes
• Event cognition
• Viewpoint deviation effect
• Visual recognition

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Christoph Gattnar and Frank Papenmeier for programming the stimuli and Sonja Weigand for conducting the experiments.