ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to analyse the nature of the mental representations that support both our conscious awareness of the identities of objects and our unconscious ability to compute their invariant structures over changes in space and time. It is argued that such identity-based and structure-based aspects of object recognition are coded by, and accessed from, distinct underlying systems. Empirical evidence for this claim comes from a line of research showing dissociations between structural and identity-based, or episodic, representations of objects as a result of encoding manipulations, study-to-test transformations in object attributes, and the use of selected subject populations. It is hypothesised, also, that these dissociable representational systems may have correspondingly distinct neural substrates.
