The tendency to overestimate what is visible in a planar mirror amongst adults and children

Bertamini, Marco; Wynne, Lauren A.

doi:10.1080/09541440902934087

Cited by 8 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…For instance, if the imagined character approaches the mirror by moving verticallysay, climbing up a rope parallel to the wall (Croucher et al 2002) or moving in a glass lift (Bertamini et al 2003) -people neither expect to see the reflection before reaching the near edge of the mirror, nor to see it appearing at the farther edge (i.e., opposite relative to the direction of the approach). Experience does not lead to better understanding of mirror reflections; on the contrary, adults make larger errors compared to children (Bertamini & Wynne 2009).…”

Section: Anisotropy and Polarization Of Space: Evidence From Naïve Opmentioning

confidence: 88%

Navigating in a three-dimensional world

et al. 2013

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The study of spatial cognition has provided considerable insight into how animals (including humans) navigate on the horizontal plane. However, the real world is three-dimensional, having a complex topography including both horizontal and vertical features, which presents additional challenges for representation and navigation. The present article reviews the emerging behavioral and neurobiological literature on spatial cognition in non-horizontal environments. We suggest that three-dimensional spaces are represented in a quasi-planar fashion, with space in the plane of locomotion being computed separately and represented differently from space in the orthogonal axis - a representational structure we have termed "bicoded." We argue that the mammalian spatial representation in surface-travelling animals comprises a mosaic of these locally planar fragments, rather than a fully integrated volumetric map. More generally, this may be true even for species that can move freely in all three dimensions, such as birds and fish. We outline the evidence supporting this view, together with the adaptive advantages of such a scheme.

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Section: Anisotropy and Polarization Of Space: Evidence From Naïve Opmentioning

confidence: 88%

Navigating in a three-dimensional world

et al. 2013

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“…We presented apes with a situation, in which the orientation of the mirror predicted the location of the food reward and examined whether the apes would use this information when searching for the food. Naive human observers are sensitive to the law of reflection even though their predictions are not perfect (e.g., Bertamini et al 2003 ; Bertamini and Wynne 2010 ; Croucher et al 2002 ; Hecht et al 2005 ). We compared apes’ performance in the mirror condition to a control condition in which the orientation of a static picture of the food reward predicted the location of the food reward.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intuitive optics: what great apes infer from mirrors and shadows

Völter

Call

2018

Anim Cogn

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There is ongoing debate about the extent to which nonhuman animals, like humans, can go beyond first-order perceptual information to abstract structural information from their environment. To provide more empirical evidence regarding this question, we examined what type of information great apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans) gain from optical effects such as shadows and mirror images. In an initial experiment, we investigated whether apes would use mirror images and shadows to locate hidden food. We found that all examined ape species used these cues to find the food. Follow-up experiments showed that apes neither confused these optical effects with the food rewards nor did they merely associate cues with food. First, naïve chimpanzees used the shadow of the hidden food to locate it but they did not learn within the same number of trials to use a perceptually similar rubber patch as indicator of the hidden food reward. Second, apes made use of the mirror images to estimate the distance of the hidden food from their own body. Depending on the distance, apes either pointed into the direction of the food or tried to access the hidden food directly. Third, apes showed some sensitivity to the geometrical relation between mirror orientation and mirrored objects when searching hidden food. Fourth, apes tended to interpret mirror images and pictures of these mirror images differently depending on their prior knowledge. Together, these findings suggest that apes are sensitive to the optical relation between mirror images and shadows and their physical referents.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1007/s10071-018-1184-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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“…The effect is related to another well-known effect: many participants believe that when approaching a flat mirror, one can see oneself before arriving in front of it. This has been referred to as the early error (Croucher et al, 2002 ; Bertamini et al, 2003b ), and it appears to be stronger in adults than in children, suggesting a possible development of a mistaken strategy in adults (Bertamini and Wynne, 2010 ). Savardi et al ( 2010 ) have proposed that this strategy is based on the combination of two beliefs: the belief that reflections do the same or the belief that they do the opposite .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding what is visible in a mirror or through a window before and after updating the position of an object

Bertamini

2014

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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In the Venus effect observers assume that Venus is admiring her own reflection in the mirror (Bertamini et al., 2003a). However, since the observer sees her face in the mirror, Venus is actually looking at the reflection of the painter. This effect is general because it is not specific to paintings or to images of people. This study tests whether people have difficulties in estimating what is visible from a given viewpoint using a paper and pencil task. Participants (N = 80) judged what is visible in a scene that could include a mirror or an aperture. The object in the scene (a train) was already located in front of the mirror or behind the aperture, or the same object had to be imagined to move to that location. The hypothesis was that this extra step (spatial transformation) is always part of how people reason about mirrors because they have to imagine the location of the reflection based on the location of the physical object. If so, this manipulation would equate the difficulty of the mirror and of the aperture conditions. Results show that performance on the paper and pencil task was better than expected, probably because of the asymmetric nature of the object used. However, an additional cost in reasoning about mirrors was confirmed.

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The tendency to overestimate what is visible in a planar mirror amongst adults and children

Cited by 8 publications

References 15 publications

Navigating in a three-dimensional world

Navigating in a three-dimensional world

Intuitive optics: what great apes infer from mirrors and shadows

Understanding what is visible in a mirror or through a window before and after updating the position of an object

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