Rotation direction affects object recognition

What role does dynamic information play in object recognition? To address this question, we probed observers' memory for novel objects rotating in depth. Irrespective of object discriminability, performance was affected by an object's rotation direction. This effect was obtained despite the same shape information and views being shown for different rotation directions. This direction effect was eliminated when either static images or animations that did not depict globally coherent rotation were used. Overall, these results suggest that dynamic information, that is, the spatiotemporal ordering of object views, provides information independent of shape or view information to a recognition system. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.