Ranking of Apparent Area for Different Shapes of Equal Area

Abstract

St~mmasy.-36 figures of equal area but different form made up six form classes: triangles, quadrilarerals, polygons, ellipses, stars and irregular figures. 24 students presented with each set one at a time were asked to rank the figures from largest to smallest in perceived area. Next these Ss ranked sets including figures from the different shape classes, the sets being formed on the basis of ranks in the first task. Kendall's W and Friedman's x.' were significant for rankings within all sets suggesting consistent and differentiated influences of form on apparent area. Significant negative correlations between figure perimeter and ranks of estimated area in Exp. 1 and their absence in Exp. 2 suggested perimeter is related to apparent area with only certain sets of figures.

The effect of object shape and mode of presentation on judgments of apparent volume

“…In the present experiments, the control and tall sets, as well as the tetrahedrons, clearly "tower" over other shapes at identical volumes, whereas spheres, cubes, octahedrons, dodecahedrons, and icosahedrons are more compact. Compactness affects size judgments of two-dimensional shapes (Anastasi, 1936;Martinez & Dawson, 1973;Smith, 1969), and the present results suggest it affects volume judgments as well, since cylinders and tetrahedrons generally appeared larger than other shapes, whereas spheres and cubes, the more geometrically compact of the solids, appeared the smallest.…”