Can the Comparisons of Feature Locations Explain the Difficulty in Discriminating Mirror-Reflected Pairs of Geometrical Figures from Disoriented Identical Pairs?

The present experiment investigates whether patterns of shifts of feature locations could affect the same/different decisions of simultaneously presented pairs of geometrical figures. A shift of locations was defined as the angular distance from the location of a feature in one figure to the location of the same feature in another figure. It was hypothesized that the difficulty in discriminating mirror-reflected (or axisymmetric) pairs from disoriented identical pairs was caused by complex shifting patterns inherent in axisymmetric pairs. According to the shifts of the locations of the four structural features, five pair types were prepared. They could be ordered from completely identical to completely different in their shifts: identical 0/4 pairs, non-identical 1/4 pairs, non-identical 2/4 pairs = axisymmetric 2/4 pairs and non-identical 4/4 pairs. The latencies for non-identical pairs decreased with the increase of difference in the shifts of feature locations, indicating that serial, self-terminating comparisons of the shifts were applied to the discrimination of non-identical pairs from identical pairs. However, the longer latencies in axisymmetric 2/4 pairs than in non-identical 2/4 pairs suggested that the difficulty for axisymmetric pairs was not caused by the complex shifting patterns, and the difficulty was not satisfactorily explained by the comparisons of feature locations.