> It seems to be how the human works. I can rotate an object in my mind and picture it from any angle. You can, but that doesn't seem to me to be how the mind

> It seems to be how the human works. I can rotate an object in my mind and picture it from any angle. You can, but that doesn't seem to me to be how the mind works. If it looked at it from every angle simultaneously there would be no speed difference in my recognising an object regardless of the orientation. But in some cases there are a huge speed difference. I can be staring at it for many seconds and then snap! - oh it's upside down. As soon as I realise this my mind immediately adapts and what was unrecognisable is suddenly as plain as day. The only way I can account for this is when I finally twig the image is upside down I re-route it through a different path in my brain that does a rotation before feeding it to the recogniser. But normally that path is shut off - it's not constantly scanning the input. I suppose what happens is in most cases some pre-processor uses other clues in the picture to tell me it's rotated from it's normal position and engages the correct path without conscious intervention. That would explain why most of the time you say you don't notice it. Nonetheless the two mechanisms are very different. A sequential path that rotation -> recognition will be slightly deeper and slightly slower than that does both in the one step, but far smaller. Nonetheless, to looks to me modern designs do attempt to do it in one step, which is to say they attempt to recognise the object in all possible orientations simultaneously.