The Venus effect in real life and in photographs

Many adults hold mistaken beliefs concerning the behavior of mechanical motion and reflections. In the field of psychology this has been investigated in the areas of naïve physics and naïve optics. The interesting question regards where these false beliefs come from. Particularly thought-provoking is the case of errors which are at odds not only with (presumably or even actually) known physical/optical concepts, but also with what

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“…Bertamini et al 2003;Bertamini et al 2010;Bianchi & Savardi 2012;Croucher et al 2002;Savardi et al 2010).…”

Section: Erroneous Beliefs In Naïve Physics and Opticsunclassified

Grounding Naïve Physics and Optics in Perception

Bianchi¹,

Savardi²

2014

Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communica

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“…The room had a rectangular shape like that in Experiment 5 in Bertamini et al (2010), and the task was similar to the task used in Bertamini (2014). Participants were assigned to one of two groups.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This is true in children as well as adults, although the bias gets stronger with development, as is the case also for intuitive beliefs about motion (Bertamini & Wynne, 2009;Kaiser, Proffitt, & McCloskey, 1985). Bertamini et al (2010) used a top-down map and participants had to evaluate what parts of a room was visible to an observer. The position of the observer was drawn simply as a circle.…”

Section: Viewpoint and Mirrorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The difficulty that many people have with reasoning about mirrors is also at the origin of The Venus effect (Bertamini, Latto, & Spooner, 2003;Bertamini et al 2010). This effect arises in situations where an observer looks at a scene in which a person is present together with a mirror, and the observer can see the person directly as well as the person's image reflected in the mirror.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Reasoning About Visibility in Mirrors: A Comparison Between a Human Observer and a Camera

Bertamini

Soranzo

2018

Perception

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Human observers make errors when predicting what is visible in a mirror. This is true for perception with real mirrors as well as for reasoning about mirrors shown in diagrams. We created an illustration of a room, a top-down view, with a mirror on a wall and objects (nails) on the opposite wall. The task was to select which nails were visible in the mirror from a given position (viewpoint). To study the importance of the social nature of the viewpoint, we divided the sample ( N = 108) in two groups. One group ( n = 54) were tested with a scene in which there was the image of a person. The other group ( n = 54) were tested with the same scene but with a camera replacing the person. Participants were instructed to think about what would be captured by a camera on a tripod. This manipulation tests the effect of social perspective-taking in reasoning about mirrors. As predicted, performance on the task shows an overestimation of what can be seen in a mirror and a bias to underestimate the role of the different viewpoints, that is, a tendency to treat the mirror as if it captures information independently of viewpoint. In terms of the comparison between person and camera, there were more errors for the camera, suggesting an advantage for evaluating a human viewpoint as opposed to an artificial viewpoint. We suggest that social mechanisms may be involved in perspective-taking in reasoning rather than in automatic attention allocation.

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“…Interestingly, mirrors have such a strong association with viewing the self that we naturally assume individuals are using mirrors for self-observation even when the laws of physics make this impossible, known as the Venus effect (Bertamini, Latto, & Spooner, 2003;Bertamini, Lawson, Jones, & Winters, 2010).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%