Volume 142, February 2016, Pages 83–95
Highlights
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- Numerosity illusions occur when the spatial arrangement of stimuli influences the quantity perception of a set.
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- We tested the Solitaire illusion among preschool children and task-naïve capuchin monkeys.
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- Monkeys perceived the numerosity illusion, although there were large individual differences.
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- Younger children performed similarly to the monkeys, whereas older children more consistently perceived the illusion like adults.
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- Human-unique perceptual experiences may play a key role in the emergence of the Solitaire illusion in humans.
Abstract
One
approach to gaining a better understanding of how we perceive the world
is to assess the errors that human and nonhuman animals make in
perceptual processing. Developmental and comparative perspectives can
contribute to identifying the mechanisms that underlie systematic
perceptual errors often referred to as perceptual illusions. In the
visual domain, some illusions appear to remain constant across the
lifespan, whereas others change with age. From a comparative
perspective, many of the illusions observed in humans appear to be
shared with nonhuman primates. Numerosity illusions are a subset of
visual illusions and occur when the spatial arrangement of stimuli
within a set influences the perception of quantity. Previous research
has found one such illusion that readily occurs in human adults, the
Solitaire illusion. This illusion appears to be less robust in two
monkey species, rhesus macaques and capuchin monkeys. We attempted to
clarify the ontogeny of this illusion from a developmental and
comparative perspective by testing human children and task-naïve
capuchin monkeys in a computerized quantity judgment task. The overall
performance of the monkeys suggested that they perceived the numerosity
illusion, although there were large differences among individuals.
Younger children performed similarly to the monkeys, whereas older
children more consistently perceived the illusion. These findings
suggest that human-unique perceptual experiences with the world might
play an important role in the emergence of the Solitaire illusion in
human adults, although other factors also may contribute.
Keywords
- Solitaire illusion;
- Human children;
- Capuchin monkeys;
- Visual illusion;
- Gestalt laws;
- Perception
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