Department of Psychology, Yale University.
Psychol Sci. 2019 Apr;30(4):495-503. doi: 10.1177/0956797619831617. Epub 2019 Feb 26.
How do we determine how much of something is present? A large body of research has investigated the mechanisms and consequences of number estimation, yet surprisingly little work has investigated area estimation. Indeed, area is often treated as a pesky confound in the study of number. Here, we describe the additive-area heuristic, a means of rapidly estimating visual area that results in substantial distortions of perceived area in many contexts, visible even in simple demonstrations. We show that when we controlled for additive area, observers were unable to discriminate on the basis of true area, per se, and that these results could not be explained by other spatial dimensions. These findings reflect a powerful perceptual illusion in their own right but also have implications for other work, namely, that which relies on area controls to support claims about number estimation. We discuss several areas of research potentially affected by these findings.
我们如何确定某个东西的数量是多少？大量的研究已经调查了数量估计的机制和结果，但令人惊讶的是，很少有研究调查面积估计。事实上，在数量研究中，面积通常被视为一个讨厌的混杂因素。在这里，我们描述了加法面积启发式，这是一种快速估计视觉面积的方法，它会导致在许多情况下对感知面积的严重扭曲，即使在简单的演示中也能看到。我们表明，当我们控制了加法面积时，观察者就无法仅仅基于真实面积来进行区分，而且这些结果不能用其他空间维度来解释。这些发现本身反映了一种强大的感知错觉，但也对其他工作产生了影响，即那些依赖于面积控制来支持关于数量估计的主张的工作。我们讨论了可能受到这些发现影响的几个研究领域。
