Abstract
Egon Brunswik (1903–1955) first made an interesting distinction between perception and explicit reasoning, arguing that perception included quick estimates of an object’s size, nearly always resulting in good approximations in uncertain environments, whereas explicit reasoning, while better at achieving exact estimates, could often fail by wide margins. An experiment conducted by Brunswik to investigate these ideas was never published and the only available information is a figure of the results presented in a posthumous book in 1956. We replicated and extended his study to gain insight into the procedures Brunswik used in obtaining his results. Explicit reasoning resulted in fewer errors, yet more extreme ones than perception. Brunswik’s graphical analysis of the results led to different conclusions, however, than did a modern statistically-based analysis.
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Notes
The geometric means calculated from the estimated data were equivalent to those reported by Brunswik.
Descriptive statistics and t-tests were conducted by Mike Doherty and Ryan Tweney.
Thanks to Travis Druckrey and Mike Richardson for cutting the additional cubes.
References
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Athy, J., Friedrich, J. & Delany, E. Replication and Pedagogy in the History of Psychology VI: Egon Brunswik on Perception and Explicit Reasoning. Sci & Educ 17, 537–546 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-007-9109-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-007-9109-3