Familiarity with an Object’s Size Influences the Perceived Size of Its Image

Abstract

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.