Department of Psychology, Harvard University, William James Hall, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA; Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, 1285 Franz Hall, Box 951563, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, William James Hall, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA; Center for Brains, Minds and Machines, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT Bldg 46-3160, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
Cognition. 2022 Aug;225:105114. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105114. Epub 2022 Apr 2.
When viewing objects depicted in a frame, observers prefer to view large objects like cars in larger sizes and smaller objects like cups in smaller sizes. That is, the visual size of an object that "looks best" is linked to its typical physical size in the world. Why is this the case? One intuitive possibility is that these preferences are driven by semantic knowledge: For example, when we recognize a sofa, we access our knowledge about its real-world size, and this influences what size we prefer to view the sofa within a frame. However, might visual processing play a role in this phenomenon-that is, do visual features that are related to big and small objects look better at big and small visual sizes, respectively, even when observers do not have explicit access to semantic knowledge about the objects? To test this possibility, we used "texform" images, which are synthesized versions of recognizable objects, which critically retain local perceptual texture and coarse contour information, but are no longer explicitly recognizable. To test for visual size preferences, we first used a size adjustment task, and the results were equivocal. However, clear results were obtained using a two-interval forced choice task, in which each texform was presented at the preferred visual size of its corresponding original image, and a visual size slightly bigger or smaller. Observers consistently selected the texform presented at the canonical visual size as the more aesthetically pleasing one. An additional control experiment ruled out alternative explanations related to size priming effects. These results suggest that the preferred visual size of an object depends not only on explicit knowledge of its real-world size, but also can be evoked by mid-level visual features that systematically covary with an object's real-world size.
当观察框架内的物体时，观察者更喜欢将汽车等大物体视为更大尺寸，将杯子等小物体视为更小尺寸。也就是说，“看起来最佳”的物体的视觉尺寸与其在现实世界中的典型物理尺寸相关联。为什么会这样呢？一种直观的可能性是，这些偏好是由语义知识驱动的：例如，当我们识别出一张沙发时，我们会获取有关其实际尺寸的知识，而这会影响我们在框架内查看沙发的尺寸偏好。然而，视觉处理是否在这种现象中发挥作用，即，即使观察者没有明确的关于物体的语义知识，与大物体和小物体相关的视觉特征是否分别在大的和小的视觉尺寸上看起来更好？为了检验这种可能性，我们使用了“texform”图像，这是可识别物体的合成版本，关键是保留了局部感知纹理和粗略轮廓信息，但不再明确可识别。为了测试视觉尺寸偏好，我们首先使用了尺寸调整任务，结果模棱两可。然而，使用两间隔强制选择任务得到了明确的结果，在该任务中，每个 texform 都以其相应原始图像的首选视觉尺寸呈现，并呈现稍大或稍小的视觉尺寸。观察者一致选择呈现其典型视觉尺寸的 texform，认为它更具美感。一个额外的控制实验排除了与尺寸启动效应相关的替代解释。这些结果表明，物体的首选视觉尺寸不仅取决于其现实世界尺寸的明确知识，还可以通过与物体现实世界尺寸系统相关的中级视觉特征来唤起。
