Department of Psychology, The Citadel, Charleston, SC, 29409, USA.
Department of Psychology and Language Research Center, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2021 Jul;83(5):2123-2135. doi: 10.3758/s13414-021-02272-7. Epub 2021 Mar 16.
The letter height superiority effect reveals that human adults judge letters to be taller than identically sized pseudoletters. This effect extends to words, such that words are estimated to be greater in size or lasting longer in duration than pseudowords of the same size or those presented for the same duration. The physical properties of letters and words also impact their perceived size, such that higher contrast between figure-ground stimuli leads to greater size estimates. Specifically, black letters on a white background (high contrast between figure and ground) are judged to be taller than gray letters and gray pseudoletters on a white background (low contrast between figure and ground) for adult humans. In the current study, we assessed whether this effect would extend to nonverbal stimuli (shapes) such that high-contrast shapes would lead to greater size estimates relative to low-contrast shapes for human children and rhesus monkeys in a two-choice discrimination task. We found that children and monkeys tended to overestimate the size of high-contrast shapes relative to low-contrast shapes consistent with results reported among human adults. Implications for perceptual fluency and its impact on subjective size estimates are discussed.
字母高度优势效应表明，人类成年人判断字母比相同大小的伪字母更高。这种效应延伸到单词，使得单词的大小或持续时间估计比相同大小的伪词或呈现相同持续时间的伪词更长。字母和单词的物理特性也会影响它们的感知大小，例如，图形与背景之间更高的对比度会导致更大的大小估计。具体来说，黑色字母在白色背景上（图形和背景之间的对比度高）比灰色字母和灰色伪字母在白色背景上（图形和背景之间的对比度低）对于成年人类来说更高。在当前的研究中，我们评估了这种效应是否会扩展到非语言刺激（形状），例如，在二选一辨别任务中，高对比度的形状相对于低对比度的形状会导致人类儿童和恒河猴的大小估计更大。我们发现，儿童和猴子倾向于高估高对比度形状的大小相对于低对比度形状，这与在人类成年人中报告的结果一致。讨论了知觉流畅性及其对主观大小估计的影响。
