Constructing Mental Representations of Objects From Successive Views

A three-dimensional analogue of Hochberg's (1968) aperture viewing paradigm, the orthogonal slices task, examined the effects of complexity on processing objects. Ten subjects constructed, transformed, and compared mental representations of Shepard-Metzler (1971) figures varying in the number of component parts; processing time increased with complexity. A second study showed no effects of complexity on processing time when subjects merely judged the equivalence of the patterns used in the first study presented in sequence. Rather, constructed mental representations appear to preserve some of the spatial character of the corresponding objects. This conclusion was strengthened by the results of recognition tasks which showed that discrimination of constructed objects from appropriate distractors is better after subjects do the first (orthogonal slices) task than after they do the second (sequence matching) task.