For animals, any thing that moves is food, provided the moving object is (considerably) smaller than the animal detecting the moving object. In addition, in animals but not iln robots, animals identify other animals and food by their scent.

Yeah sure. I worked for a considerable amount of time in Zaf Bashir lab, which closely collaborate with Clea Warburton lab. Clea's lab is strongly competent in visual recognition memory behavioural experiments, and she mainly uses the spontaneous novel object recognition task. Zaf's lab is mainly focused on the cellular mechanisms underlying this kind of memory, and studies synaptic transmission and synaptic plasticity in the perirhinal cortex (Prh), the brain area which encodes for visual recognition memory.

The behavioural task (spontaneous novel object exploration) mainly consists on the natural curiosity that the animal has towards novel visual stimuli. First, the animal is habituated to explore two identical objects in an arena; later, after a certain amount of time (2hrs - 24 hrs - 1 week etc) the animal is placed back in the arena, where one of the 2 objects is replaced with a novel object: if the animal will preferentially explore the novel object (spending more time looking at it etc), it means that he recognised the familiar one. In order to study the cellular mechanisms underlying this kind of memories, different drugs blocking certain kind of neural transmission are directly infused in the Prh and their effect on visual recognition memory is measured. Plus, the mechanism can be explored at a cellular level by measuring synaptic transmission and plasticity on acute brain slices containing Prh.

Papers:

Of course mine ehehehe: Tamagnini et al., 2013, J. of Phys.

And a whole lot of Zaf's and Clea's work (i.e.: Griffiths et al., 2008, Neuron; Seoane et al., 2009, J. of Neuroscience; Barker et al., 2006, J. of Neuroscience etc.). I could go on but it takes less time if you just type it in pubmed.

On the other hand, the animal can be exposed to novel vs familiar stimuli in the visual field of each eye, and then the effects on the controlateral Prh can be measured electrophysiologically or molecularly i.e. http://www.jneurosci.org/content/28/30/7548.long

There are of course many other research groups studying this kind of memory: here there are two example papers that might help you

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20141280 (Aggleton is big in visual recognition memory)

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1074742712001128 (and Winters as well)

I guess, that since you are a robot guy, you might be interested in some modelling and you may want a more generalised start point (less biological/molecular etc.) i'd say start from here

http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/357/1424/1083.long

Hope that helped.

Cheers

Fra.

Hi Mohammad, you can refer one of my paper also for your reference. Link is

http://airccse.org/journal/sipij/papers/4313sipij07.pdf

Human: Look into:Hill H, Pollick FE (2000) Psychol Sci 11:223-228; Loula F et al (2005) J Exp Psychol Hum Percep Perform 31:210-220; Troje NF (2005) Percep Psychphys 127:1267-1275 Also look in gender differences for human perception

Two authors:

Jakob von Uexküll, Theoretical Biology, the forerunner of biosemiotics

J.J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception

Three widely cited reviews, enough to get oriented in the field:

Kourtzi, Zoe, & Connor, Charles E. (2011). Neural representations for object perception: structure, category, and adaptive coding. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 34, 45-67.

Logothetis, Nikos K., & Sheinberg, David L. (1996). Visual object recognition. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 19, 577-621.

Tanaka, Keiji. (1996). Inferotemporal cortex and object vision. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 19, 109-139.

My publication are more oriented towards vehicle classification

my colleague have said it all but just want to add that novel object recognition test has a purpose and it is what you are looking for that determines why you should use it. Ennaceur and Delacour, 1988 method will help. check it out

I have recently attended a conference and was lucky enough to see an invited lecture on hierarchical object representation for learning and recognition - for an intro see here:

http://www.vicos.si/Research/LearnedHierarchyOfParts

The author also made some comments on how the methods he presented can be related to what is performed by the chunk of grey mass between our ears when we try to recognize objects based on visual information - see here:

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6389683