Smartphone display size can influence perceptual judgments

Abstract

Classic research in perception has suggested that visual context can impact how individuals perceive object characteristics like physical size. The current set of studies extends this work to an applied setting by examining whether smartphone display size can impact the perception of objects presented on smartphones. Participants viewed several target items, on two different sized virtual device displays based on actual consumer devices and were asked to make simple judgments of the size of presented objects. Results from both experiments confirm that display size impacts perceived size, such that larger displays cause users to significantly underestimate the size of objects moreso than smaller displays. This is the first study to confirm such an effect, and suggests that beyond aesthetics or cost, one’s personal choice of device might have additional performance consequences.

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“…Hancock et al examined four differing screen sizes under three varying levels of time pressure and found "performance decrement and workload elevation" in small device form factors when under restrictive time pressure [11]. Sanchez et al report that display size impacts perceived size, which are more accurate when viewed on smaller screens [42,43]. Maniar et al examined the effect of non-touch mobile phones' screen size on video based learning [29].…”