The Venus Effect: People's Understanding of Mirror Reflections in Paintings

Abstract

We propose the term 'Venus effect' for a common phenomenon in picture perception. It occurs when a picture shows an actor and a mirror that are not placed along the observer's line of sight, for instance a Venus admiring herself in a small mirror, and when the actor's reflection in the mirror is visible to the observer. In this situation, observers tend to report, incorrectly, that Venus is also seeing herself in the mirror in the same location as the observer. We discuss this using famous paintings as examples.

The Venus effect in real life and in photographs

“…We take this as evidence that these proportions are not specific to one procedure; instead, they reflect the fact that for many of the participants, Vince did not need to be in front of a mirror to see himself. This may be surprising but is entirely consistent with the documented early error in the literature (Bertamini, Latto, & Spooner, 2003;Croucher et al, 2002). For instance, in Croucher et al, there were three groups of responses that appeared across all of the experiments: Few people thought that a person can see herself in a mirror as soon as the mirror is visible to her; 40%-50% correctly expected that the person had to reach the near edge of the mirror, and 30%-50% placed their responses too (n 35) saw the vertical stimuli, and the other (n 31) saw the horizontal stimuli.…”

“…The original article gave the impression that the Venus effect is about how people read the image from a picture and that, in this sense, the Venus effect is specific to picture perception (Bertamini, Latto, & Spooner, 2003). Here, we argue against this view.…”

“…The answers given by the participants were classified on the basis of what they claimed that the mannequin (Bertamini, Latto, & Spooner, 2003;Croucher et al, 2002).…”

“…This was done to see whether the presence of the face is used Vince could see the observer reflected in the mirror for these situations, but not for the other four scenes. The original description of the Venus effect (Bertamini, Latto, & Spooner, 2003) predicts instead that the participants should incorrectly say that Vince could see himself for these two photographs, but not for the other four scenes. In fact, Vince could fully see himself only when he was in front of the mirror, but he could see part of his face when he was opposite the edge of the mirror.…”

The ‘not-so-strange’ body in the mirror: A principal components analysis of direct and mirror self-observation

“…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).…”