Prior experience of rotation is not required for recognizing objects seen from different angles

An object viewed from different angles can be recognized and distinguished from similar distractors after the viewer has had experience watching it rotate. It has been assumed that as an observer watches the rotation, separate representations of individual views become associated with one another. However, we show here that once monkeys learned to discriminate individual views of objects, they were able to recognize objects across rotations up to 60 degrees, even though there had been no opportunity to learn the association between different views. Our results suggest that object recognition across small or medium changes in viewing angle depends on features common to similar views of objects.