Assessing human 3D shape cognition in a controlled and quantifiable manner remains challenging, as existing approaches often rely on visual cues influenced by prior experience. We introduce a geometry-based experimental paradigm in which 3D objects are progressively disclosed using a Bounding Volume Hierarchy (BVH), a widely used hierarchical structure in computer graphics. By revealing bounding volumes level by level, the framework provides a controllable and reproducible mechanism for regulating the amount of geometric information available during each trial.
A user study across multiple object categories shows that recognition responses frequently emerge at coarse-to-intermediate BVH levels and approach saturation at deeper levels, while recognition accuracy increases as additional geometric detail becomes available. Higher confidence is associated with correct recognition outcomes and, less robustly, with responses at shallower BVH levels. These results suggest that hierarchical geometric structure provides an effective basis for controlled evaluation of human 3D shape recognition.
BVHs thus offer a structured framework for constructing controlled geometric stimuli and for probing recognition thresholds, accumulation dynamics, and the relationship between confidence and accuracy in human 3D shape cognition. This work was supported in part by a New Faculty Research Grant of Pusan National University, 2025, in part by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (RS-2023-00245613, RS-2024-00352439), in part by Institute of Information & communications Technology Planning & Evaluation (IITP) under the Artificial Intelligence Convergence Innovation Human Resources Development (IITP-2026-RS-2023-00254177) grant funded by the Korea government(MSIT). These authors contributed equally to this work: Heeyoung Park and Jinyoung Choi.
Department of Psychology, Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea Department of Information Convergence Engineering, Pusan National University, Busan, Republic of Korea School of Computer Science and Engineering, Pusan National University, Busan, Republic of Korea Y.P. is the named inventor on a pending patent application related to the BVH-based stimulus-generation pipeline described in this study (patent applicant: Pusan National University; sole inventor: Youngjin Park; application number: 10-2026-0008520; status: pending; aspect covered: the method for constructing and progressively disclosing BVH-based stimuli). The other authors (H.P. and J.C.) declare no competing interests. Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material.
If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Park, H., Choi, J. & Park, Y.
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