Viewpoint dependency in the recognition of dynamic scenes.

In 3 experiments, the question of viewpoint dependency in mental representations of dynamic scenes was addressed. Participants viewed film clips of soccer episodes from 1 or 2 viewpoints; they were then required to discriminate between video stills of the original episode and distractors. Recognition performance was measured in terms of accuracy and speed. The degree of viewpoint deviation between the initial presentation and the test stimuli was varied, as was both the point of time presented by the video stills and participants' soccer expertise. Findings suggest that viewers develop a viewpoint-dependent mental representation similar to the spatial characteristics of the original episode presentation, even if the presentation was spatially inhomogeneous.