# Visual expertise for aerial- and ground-views of houses: No evidence for mental rotation, but experts were more diligent than novices

## TL;DR

Expert surveyors are better at recognizing house images from aerial and ground views, not because of mental rotation, but because they are more careful in their comparisons.

## Contribution

The study reveals that aerial expertise does not involve mental rotation but leads to more cautious and diligent comparison strategies in object recognition.

## Key findings

- Experts showed a speed-accuracy trade-off, responding more cautiously than novices.
- There was no evidence of mental rotation in either experts or novices in house recognition tasks.
- Participants likely used feature comparisons based on volumetric or surface-connected prototypes of houses.

## Abstract

Ordnance Survey (OS) remote sensing surveyors have extensive experience with aerial views of scenes and objects. Building on our previous work with this group, we investigated whether their expertise influenced performance on a same/different object recognition task involving houses. In an online study, these stimuli were shown from both familiar ground-level viewpoints and from what is for most people, unfamiliar aerial viewpoints. OS experts and novices compared achromatic, disparity-free images with aerial perspectives rotated around the clock against canonical ground-views; we measured response times (RTs) and sensitivities (d’). In two ‘grounding’ tasks using rotated letters, we found conventional outcomes for both groups, validating the online approach. Experiment 1 (non-matching letters) yielded ceiling-level performance with no signs of mental rotation, consistent with a feature-based recognition strategy. In Experiment 2 (mirror reversed letters), both groups showed orientation-dependent performance, but experts exhibited a speed-accuracy trade-off, responding more cautiously than novices. In the main house task (Experiment 3), we found (a) the same speed-accuracy trade-off observed in Experiment 2, (b) substantially longer RTs overall, and (c) no evidence for mental rotation in either group, mirroring Experiment 1. Contrary to our earlier findings on aerial depth perception, expertise in remote sensing did not yield a distinctive recognition strategy for the experiments here. However, experts displayed more diligent tactics in Experiments 2 and 3. We suggest that all participants in Experiment 3 engaged in cognitively challenging feature comparisons across viewpoints, presumably supported by volumetric or surface-connected prototypes of houses as the basis for feature comparisons.