A size illusion of the letter ‘P’

The perceived size of ‘P’ and ‘p’ is influenced by their vertical position relative to nearby letters. In the experiments reported here, we show that uppercase ‘P’ appears smallest when it is displaced downward toward the letter’s lowercase position, whereas lowercase ‘p’ appears largest when it is...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inVision research (Oxford) Vol. 40; no. 4; pp. 401 - 407
Main Authors Katz, Milton, Pola, Jordan
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Oxford Elsevier Ltd 01.01.2000
Elsevier Science
Subjects
Biological and medical sciences
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Humans
Letter perception
Optical Illusions
Perception
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Psychometrics
Size Perception
Vision
Visual illusions
Visual illusions
Letter perception
Perception
Human
Letter
Visual stimulus
Perception threshold
Differential threshold
Vision
Optical illusion
Psychophysics
Experimental study
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Summary:The perceived size of ‘P’ and ‘p’ is influenced by their vertical position relative to nearby letters. In the experiments reported here, we show that uppercase ‘P’ appears smallest when it is displaced downward toward the letter’s lowercase position, whereas lowercase ‘p’ appears largest when it is near the uppercase position. Our results show that this P-illusion not only occurs in the presence of nearby letters, but is also found when ‘P’ is displaced relative to a nearby horizontal line. This type of size illusion seems to clearly occur only with ‘P’ and ‘p’, and we suggest that it is a result of learning to read and recognize letters in the English alphabet.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
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ISSN:0042-6989
1878-5646
DOI:10.1016/S0042-6989(99)00192-3