Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London, Malet Street, London, WC1E7HX, UK.
School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading, Reading, UK.
Sci Rep. 2021 Jan 12;11(1):494. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-80073-y.
There is growing interest in how human observers perceive social scenes containing multiple people. Interpersonal distance is a critical feature when appraising these scenes; proxemic cues are used by observers to infer whether two people are interacting, the nature of their relationship, and the valence of their current interaction. Presently, however, remarkably little is known about how interpersonal distance is encoded within the human visual system. Here we show that the perception of interpersonal distance is distorted by the Müller-Lyer illusion. Participants perceived the distance between two target points to be compressed or expanded depending on whether face pairs were positioned inside or outside the to-be-judged interval. This illusory bias was found to be unaffected by manipulations of face direction. These findings aid our understanding of how human observers perceive interpersonal distance and may inform theoretical accounts of the Müller-Lyer illusion.
人们对于人类观察者如何感知包含多个人的社交场景越来越感兴趣。当评估这些场景时，人际距离是一个关键特征；观察者使用亲空间线索来推断两个人是否正在互动、他们关系的性质以及他们当前互动的效价。然而，目前对于人际距离是如何在人类视觉系统中编码的，人们知之甚少。在这里，我们展示了人际距离的感知会受到穆勒-莱尔错觉的扭曲。参与者感知到两个目标点之间的距离被压缩或扩展，具体取决于人脸对是位于要判断的区间内还是区间外。发现这种错觉偏差不受人脸方向的影响。这些发现有助于我们理解人类观察者如何感知人际距离，并可能为穆勒-莱尔错觉的理论解释提供信息。
