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Whereas most sensory information is coded in a logarithmic scale, linear expansion of a limited range may provide a more efficient coding for angular variables important to precise motor control. In four experiments it is shown that the perceived declination of gaze, like the perceived orientation of surfaces is coded on a distorted scale. The distortion seems to arise from a nearly linear expansion of the angular range close to horizontal/straight ahead and is evident in explicit verbal and non-verbal measures (Experiments 1 and 2) and in implicit measures of perceived gaze direction (Experiment 4). The theory is advanced that this scale expansion (by a factor of about 1.5) may serve a functional goal of coding efficiency for angular perceptual variables. The scale expansion of perceived gaze declination is accompanied by a corresponding expansion of perceived optical slants in the same range (Experiments 3 and 4). These dual distortions can account for the explicit misperception of distance typically obtained by direct report and exocentric matching while allowing accurate spatial action to be understood as the result of calibration.

Cognitive biases in the perception of spatial orientation Areas of Current Research Interest Space perception (including self-motion perception) construed as an informationprocessing task in which coding advantages (precision) may explain known biases Metaphor processing and interpretation Cognitive and social factors in perception experiments Visual attention (including gaze allocation) and executive control (Stroop) Visual number perception (especially adaptation of texture density) as cue integration 2

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Experiments take place in a physical environment but also a social environment. Generalizability from experimental manipulations to more typical contexts may be limited by violations of ecological validity with respect to either the physical or the social environment. A replication and extension of a recent study (a blood glucose manipulation) was conducted to investigate the effects of experimental demand (a social artifact) on participant behaviors judging the geographical slant of a large-scale outdoor hill. Three different assessments of experimental demand indicate that even when the physical environment is naturalistic, and the goal of the main experimental manipulation was primarily concealed, artificial aspects of the social environment (such as an explicit requirement to wear a heavy backpack while estimating the slant of a hill) may still be primarily responsible for altered judgments of hill orientation.