Perception
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Before methods for drawing accurately in perspective were developed in the 15th century, many artists drew with divergent perspective. But we found that many university students draw with divergent perspective rather than with the correct convergent perspective. These experiments were designed to reveal why people tend to draw with divergent perspective. ⋯ Each subject's drawing was much worse than the drawing selected as accurate. An analysis of errors in drawings of a cube and of isolated edges and surfaces of a cube revealed several factors that predispose people to draw in divergent perspective. The way these factors intrude depends on the order in which the edges of the cube are drawn.
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Seeing the talker improves the intelligibility of speech degraded by noise (a visual speech benefit). Given that talkers exaggerate spoken articulation in noise, this set of two experiments examined whether the visual speech benefit was greater for speech produced in noise than in quiet. We first examined the extent to which spoken articulation was exaggerated in noise by measuring the motion of face markers as four people uttered 10 sentences either in quiet or in babble-speech noise (these renditions were also filmed). ⋯ Speech intelligibility was tested in a second experiment using a speech-perception-in-noise task under auditory-visual and auditory-only conditions. The results showed that the visual speech benefit was greater for speech recorded in noise than for speech recorded in quiet. Furthermore, the amount of articulatory movement was related to performance on the perception task, indicating that the enhanced gestures made when speaking in noise function to make speech more intelligible.
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Action-specific effects on perception are apparent in terrestrial environments. For example, targets that require more effort to walk, jump, or throw to look farther away than when the targets require less effort. Here, we examined whether action-specific effects would generalize to an underwater environment. ⋯ Those who estimated distance while wearing the flippers judged underwater targets to be closer than did participants who had taken them off. In addition, participants with better swimming ability judged the targets to be closer than did those with worse swimming ability. These results suggest perceived distance underwater is a function of the perceiver's ability to swim to the targets.
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Subjects were shown photographs of UK MPs' faces and asked to judge their political affiliations. Participants were unable to correctly distinguish between Conservative and Labour politicians. However, their responses were used to create computer-generated idealised faces representative of each party, which independent evaluators could correctly identify. These faces give an indication of the mental images we might reference when imagining MPs from the two main UK political parties.