The Ebbinghaus illusion deceives adults but not young children

Abstract

The sensitivity of size perception to context has been used to distinguish between ‘vision for action’ and ‘vision for perception’, and to study cultural, psychopathological, and developmental differences in perception. The status of that evidence is much debated, however. Here we use a rigorous double dissociation paradigm based on the Ebbinghaus illusion, and find that for children below 7 years of age size discrimination is much less affected by surround size. Young children are less accurate than adults when context is helpful, but more accurate when context is misleading. Even by the age of 10 years context‐sensitivity is still not at adult levels. Therefore, size contrast as shown by the Ebbinghaus illusion is not a built‐in property of the ventral pathway subserving vision for perception but a late development of it, and low sensitivity to the Ebbinghaus illusion in autism is not primary to the pathology. Our findings also show that, although adults in Western cultures have low context‐sensitivity relative to East Asians, they have high context‐sensitivity relative to children. Overall, these findings reveal a gradual developmental trend toward ever broader contextual syntheses. Such developments are advantageous, but the price paid for them is that, when context is misleading, adults literally see the world less accurately than they did as children.

A new illusion of height and width: taller people are perceived as thinner

“…Here, the width and height of the stimulus serve as contrasting elements, in the same way that the large and small circles do in the Ebbinghaus illusion, with the smaller width, for example, inducing the height to look larger by contrast. However, unlike the Ebbinghaus illusion, which requires sensitivity to global context (de Fockert, Davidoff, Fagot, Parron, & Goldstein, 2007;Doherty, Campbell, Tsuji, & Phillips, 2010), in this case the contrasting "elements" are integral dimensions of the same object.…”

Temporal processing characteristics of the Ponzo illusion

“…This perceptual task is as similar as possible to the priming task to allow for meaningful conclusions from a potential dissociation between the results in both tasks (Schmidt & Vorberg, 2006). It also represents the method of forced-choice discrimination which is an established method to measure the perceptual strength of visual illusions (e.g., Doherty, Campbell, Tsuji & Phillips, 2010;Moore & Egeth, 1997;Reynolds, 1978).…”

Comparison of visual perceptual organization in schizophrenia and body dysmorphic disorder

“…Note that in this condition, if subjects choose the array with larger surrounds then they will be wrong on every trial. As in prior studies, only 16 trials were presented in the helpful condition, and they were all at the hardest difficulty level (for Rutgers .05° size difference between center circles) (Phillips et al, 2004; Doherty et al, 2008; Doherty, 2010). The 96 trials in the context conditions (80 in the misleading and 16 in the helpful conditions) were presented in a different random order for each subject.…”

“…The effect has been known for over 100 years (Titchener, 1902), and has been the subject of numerous experiments, especially since the 1970s (e.g., Massaro and Anderson, 1971; Girgus et al, 1972; Weintraub and Schneck, 1986; Coren and Enns, 1993; Rose and Bressan, 2002; Doherty, 2010; Schwarzkopf and Rees, 2013). Patients with schizophrenia have demonstrated reduced illusion effects, expressed as more accurate size perception compared to controls when judging target circle size in misleading context conditions (Uhlhaas et al, 2006; Silverstein et al, 2013; Tibber et al, 2013).…”