Visual Detection of Body Weight Change in Young Women

Abstract

To assess whether small changes in body weight can be visually detected, college students (58 women and 42 men) were asked to select the less heavy person shown in two photographs for each of 33 young women. All of these women had been photographed twice in a standardized pose and attire, separated by an 8-wk. interval during which most of them lost weight. These pairs were presented in varying orders to control for the order and side of presentation. One photograph was reliably selected as the lighter person for 64% of the pairs, but the picture selected was in fact lighter only 57% of the time. The accuracy of selecting the lighter photograph was not correlated with the percent weight change for the person shown in the pairs of photographs. The results suggest that small changes in women's weight may not have a significant perceptual effect, particularly for male perceivers.