A mass-density model can account for the size-weight illusion.

ABSTRACT: When judging the heaviness of two objects with equal mass, people perceive the smaller and denser of the two as being heavier. Despite the large number of theories, covering bottom-up and top-down approaches, none of them can fully account for all aspects of this size-weight illusion and thus for human heaviness perception. Here we propose a new maximum-likelihood estimation model which describes the illusion as the weighted average of two heaviness estimates with correlated noise: One estimate derived from the object's mass, and the other from the object's density, with estimates' weights based on their relative reliabilities. While information about mass can directly be perceived, information about density will in some cases first have to be derived from mass and volume. However, accordi

SUBMITTER: Wolf C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5813910 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature