Smeets Jeroen B J, Weijs Pauline E, Brenner Eli
Department of Human Movement Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, NL-1081 BT Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Vision (Basel). 2022 Feb 24;6(1):14. doi: 10.3390/vision6010014.
It is known that judgments about objects' distances are influenced by familiar size: a soccer ball looks farther away than a tennis ball if their images are equally large on the retina. We here investigate whether familiar size also influences judgments about the size of images of objects that are presented side-by-side on a computer screen. Sixty-three participants indicated which of two images appeared larger on the screen in a 2-alternative forced-choice discrimination task. The objects were either two different types of balls, two different types of coins, or a ball and a grey disk. We found that the type of ball biased the comparison between their image sizes: the size of the image of the soccer ball was over-estimated by about 5% (assimilation). The bias in the comparison between the two balls was equal to the sum of the biases in the comparisons with the grey disk. The bias for the coins was smaller and in the opposite direction (contrast). The average precision of the size comparison was 3.5%, irrespective of the type of object. We conclude that knowing a depicted object's real size can influence the perceived size of its image, but the perceived size is not always attracted towards the familiar size.
众所周知，对物体距离的判断会受到熟悉大小的影响：如果足球和网球在视网膜上的成像大小相同，那么足球看起来比网球更远。我们在此研究熟悉大小是否也会影响对在电脑屏幕上并排呈现的物体图像大小的判断。63名参与者在一项二选一的强制选择辨别任务中指出屏幕上的两个图像中哪一个看起来更大。这些物体要么是两种不同类型的球、两种不同类型的硬币，要么是一个球和一个灰色圆盘。我们发现球的类型会影响它们图像大小之间的比较：足球图像的大小被高估了约5%（同化）。两个球之间比较的偏差等于与灰色圆盘比较的偏差之和。硬币的偏差较小且方向相反（对比）。无论物体类型如何，大小比较的平均精度为3.5%。我们得出结论，知道所描绘物体的实际大小会影响对其图像的感知大小，但感知大小并不总是趋向于熟悉大小。
