Images, Words, and Questions: Variables That Influence Beliefs about Vision in Children and Adults

Implicit model of other people’s visual attention as an invisible, force-carrying beam projecting from the eyes

“…Our finding of an ∼5% incidence of extramission beliefs conflicts with previous work suggesting that more than half of US adults, possibly as high as 60 to 70%, explicitly believe in an extramission account (17–19). We cannot easily explain this difference.…”

“…Second, we asked participants explicitly how they believed vision worked, and whether they believed that vision was accomplished by something coming into or flowing out of the eyes. We could not replicate the previous finding that most people explicitly believe in an extramission view of vision (17–19). Instead, about 5% of the participants stated that they believed in extramission.…”

“…In the 1970s, Piaget (16) found that most children hold a naïve belief that vision is caused by something beaming out of the eyes. In the 1990s, Winer, Cottrell, and coworkers (17–19) reported that more than half of American college students hold the same view. The extraordinary, widespread belief in an extramission account of vision, and especially its universality in children (16), suggests that it may be rooted in a cognitive process that is deeper than just a prescientific error in thinking.…”

Naive optics: Understanding the geometry of mirror reflections.

“…Another heuristic that might come into play when judging mirror images is the extramission belief cited in the introduction. Winer and colleagues (Winer, Cottrell, Karefilaki, & Chronister, 1996;Winer, Cottrell, Karefilaki, & Gregg, 1996) found the extramission belief to be revealed more frequently with the use of graphical tasks compared with the use of verbal tasks. They suggested that many people possess accurate declarative knowledge about perception while they use a naive theory for solving perception-related problems.…”

The persistence of a misconception about vision after educational interventions

“…Piaget (1929Piaget ( , 1974 was perhaps the first to document this belief in children. Subsequently, several investigators have reported extramission-like interpretations of vision in children (Anderson & Smith, 1986;Guesne, 1984Guesne, , 1985Kärrqvist & Andersson, 1983;; others have shown that, while extramission beliefs decline with age, they are also present in adults (Cottrell & Winer, 1994;Winer, Cottrell, Karefilaki, & Gregg, 1996).…”