On the Identification of Misoriented Objects: Effects of Task and Level of Stimulus Description

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Abstract
Three experiments are reported that examined the effects of misorientation in-the-plane on identification of natural objects and artifacts. Performance was tested in three tasks requiring the assignment of base level names, superordinate names and subordinate names to objects, respectively. The effects of misorientation varied as a function of the task, with stronger effects apparent on base level and subordinate level naming than on naming at the superordinate level, and stronger effects on subordinate than on base level naming. Rotation effects, when they occurred, were additive with effects of stimulus category. These results suggest that object identification can proceed in parallel with processes that normalise misoriented stimuli, but the object descriptions derived without normalisation are coarse and consistently sufficient only for superordinate classification. Before finergrained identification processes can operate for base level or subordinate naming of both natural objects and artifacts, some form of normalisation is required. However, normalisation is not necessary for object descriptions to access stored knowledge.