Abstract
Twenty-seven university students judged whether each of 128 drawings of parallelopipeds appeared to represent three-dimensional rectangular boxes. Half the pictures could not geometrically have been projections of rectangular boxes. The null hypothesis that Ss’ judgments were unrelated to geometry was rejected at the .001 level of significance, and the correlation between Ss’ judgments and perfect discrimination averaged .86 over three variations of the experiment. The results support a general hypothesis about the perception of simple space forms according to which viewers impose geometric constraints, such as rectangularity and symmetry, but only when the constraints are projectively possible.
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This research was conducted at Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education, operating under National Science Foundation Grant No. GB-31064 and Office of Education Grant No. OEG-0-9-310283-3721 (010).
Appreciation is extended to Helen Bray, Nanette de Maine, Ennio Mingolla, Louisa Rogoff, and Roy Rudenstine, for their assistance throughout, and to Howard Gardner, for his insightful comments on the experimental design and on the manuscript.
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Perkins, D.N. Visual discrimination between rectangular and nonrectangular parallelopipeds. Perception & Psychophysics 12, 396–400 (1972). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03205849
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03205849