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Size, weight, and expectations
The size-weight illusion is well-known: if two equally heavy objects differ in size, the large one feels lighter than the small one. Most explanations for this illusion assume that because the information about the relevant attribute (weight itself) is unreliable, information about an irrelevant but...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
SAGE Publications
2022
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9014675/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35354343 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/03010066221087404 |
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author | Smeets, Jeroen B.J. Vos, Kim Abbink, Emma Plaisier, Myrthe |
author_facet | Smeets, Jeroen B.J. Vos, Kim Abbink, Emma Plaisier, Myrthe |
author_sort | Smeets, Jeroen B.J. |
collection | PubMed |
description | The size-weight illusion is well-known: if two equally heavy objects differ in size, the large one feels lighter than the small one. Most explanations for this illusion assume that because the information about the relevant attribute (weight itself) is unreliable, information about an irrelevant but correlated attribute (size) is used as well. If such reasoning is correct, one would expect that the illusion can be inverted: if size information is unreliable, weight information will be used to judge size. We explored whether such a weight-size illusion exists by asking participants to lift Styrofoam balls that were coated with glow in the dark paint. The balls (2 sizes, 3 weights) were lifted using a pulley system in complete darkness at 2 distances. Participants reported the size using free magnitude estimation. The visual size information was indeed unreliable: balls that were presented at a 20% larger distance were judged 15% smaller. Nevertheless, the judgments of size were not systematically affected by the 20% weight change (differences < 0.5%). We conclude that because the weight-size illusion does not exist, the mechanism behind the size-weight illusion is specific for judging heaviness. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9014675 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | SAGE Publications |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-90146752022-04-19 Size, weight, and expectations Smeets, Jeroen B.J. Vos, Kim Abbink, Emma Plaisier, Myrthe Perception Short Report The size-weight illusion is well-known: if two equally heavy objects differ in size, the large one feels lighter than the small one. Most explanations for this illusion assume that because the information about the relevant attribute (weight itself) is unreliable, information about an irrelevant but correlated attribute (size) is used as well. If such reasoning is correct, one would expect that the illusion can be inverted: if size information is unreliable, weight information will be used to judge size. We explored whether such a weight-size illusion exists by asking participants to lift Styrofoam balls that were coated with glow in the dark paint. The balls (2 sizes, 3 weights) were lifted using a pulley system in complete darkness at 2 distances. Participants reported the size using free magnitude estimation. The visual size information was indeed unreliable: balls that were presented at a 20% larger distance were judged 15% smaller. Nevertheless, the judgments of size were not systematically affected by the 20% weight change (differences < 0.5%). We conclude that because the weight-size illusion does not exist, the mechanism behind the size-weight illusion is specific for judging heaviness. SAGE Publications 2022-03-30 2022-05 /pmc/articles/PMC9014675/ /pubmed/35354343 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/03010066221087404 Text en © The Author(s) 2022 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). |
spellingShingle | Short Report Smeets, Jeroen B.J. Vos, Kim Abbink, Emma Plaisier, Myrthe Size, weight, and expectations |
title | Size, weight, and expectations |
title_full | Size, weight, and expectations |
title_fullStr | Size, weight, and expectations |
title_full_unstemmed | Size, weight, and expectations |
title_short | Size, weight, and expectations |
title_sort | size, weight, and expectations |
topic | Short Report |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9014675/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35354343 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/03010066221087404 |
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