Perceptual and Motor Skills, 2011, 113, 3, 881-893. © Perceptual and Motor Skills 2011 DOI 10.2466/22.24.27.PMS.113.6.881-893 ISSN 0031-5125 INTERACTIVE PROCESSING AMONG PARTS, CONFIGURATION, AND ORIENTATION OF COMPLEX OBJECTS 1, 2 SHIQI LI AND GUOMEI ZHOU Department of Psychology Sun Yat-sen University Summary.—The aim of the present study was to investigate whether the rep- resentation of parts and the confguration and orientation of complex objects were separate or interdependent. Participants were asked to match parts and confgura- tion of novel 3-D objects with constant or varied features in irrelevant dimensions. The results of both Exp. 1 (sequential matching) and Exp. 2 (simultaneous match- ing) showed that both sensitivity and response time (RT) of part matching were infuenced by whether the irrelevant confguration remained constant or varied. Both sensitivity and RT for confguration matching were afected by the variation of irrelevant parts in Exp. 2, but only sensitivity was afected in Exp. 1. These results demonstrated an interdependent patern of representations of parts and relations but diferent interactive paterns in memory and perception. The results of Exp. 3 showed orientation dependency in a confguration-matching task but orientation in- variance in a part-matching task. Consistent with a study done in 2000 by Edelman and Intrator, these results suggest an interactive processing between confguration and orientation but an independent processing between the parts and orientation. When one sees a cup, what information must be detected for immedi- ate or later discrimination? Some researchers (e.g., Biederman, 1987) have suggested that an object is mentally represented as a structure of parts and their spatial relations. Recognizing a cup requires independent coding of the shapes of parts (“curved” handle and “cylinder” body) and confgural information (“on the side of”). Thus, the cup may be represented as “on the side of (‘curved’ handle, ‘cylinder’ body).” In contrast, other research- ers (e.g., Tarr & Pinker, 1989; Jolicoeur, 1990; Bülthof & Edelman, 1992; Tarr, 1995) have suggested that objects are represented as the projections onto the retina in a “template” representation. For them, an object is pro- cessed holistically, without being parsed into parts and encoded into spa- tial relations. Edelman and Intrator (2000) combined these two theories and hold that objects are represented as local features in particular posi- tions, in a kind of dependent coding. For example, a cup is represented as “a ‘curved’ handle on the right/lef side of a ‘cylinder’ body.” According to Edelman and Intrator, if the “curved” shape of the handle is changed, 1 Address correspondence to Guomei Zhou, Department of Psychology, Sun Yat-sen Univer- sity, 135 Xingang Xi Road, Guangzhou, 510275 China or e-mail (zhougm@mail.sysu.edu.cn). 2 This article was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 30700230) and the 11th Five-year Plan in Philosophy and Social Sciences of Guangdong Province (08SXQ001) to G. Z.