Effects of geometric form features on three-dimensional object categorization

Abstract

The purpose was to investigate the effects of 3-D form features on the object-categorization process. 30 subjects [17 male and 13 female undergraduate industrial design students whose mean age was 20.7 yr. (SD= 1.5)] were asked to classify 32 3-D prismatic images according to their similarity. Multidimensional scaling and cluster analyses indicated that the classification process was strongly related to the prisms' compounded features. The attention-weighting of each individual form feature was calculated by regression analysis which further indicated that each feature had a different effect on the categorizing process.