Viewpoint Information Provided by a Familiar Environment Facilitates Object Identification

We studied whether contextual information regarding an observer’s location within a familiar scene could influence the identification of objects. The context was provided by a 3D virtual living room, which allowed natural familiarization of the scene and objects together with a high level of interactivity. Results of initial self-orientation judgments obtained in the room showed observers could make accurate judgments of their instantaneous orientation with respect to a reference point. We wanted to know if this information could in turn be used as an aid to identify objects from unfamiliar viewpoints. Our main experiment showed that after familiarization of objects within the virtual room, the presence of the room during identification produced significantly fewer errors than when the objects were shown in isolation. This reduction in error was attributed to the provision of a consistent reference frame by the room. This was tested by a control experiment, in which we randomly varied the orientation of the objects with respect to the room. In this case, the observer’s relative orientation with respect to the objects could not be derived from the room. Results showed that recognition accuracy dropped significantly in this case. The results in general suggest that object identification can be aided by knowledge of where we are in space and in which direction we are looking.