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Research on naive physics and naive optics have shown that people hold surprising beliefs about everyday phenomena that are in contrast with what they see. In this article, we investigated what adults expect to be the field of view of a mirror from various viewpoints. The studies presented here confirm that humans have difficulty dealing with the role of the viewpoint in reflections and consistently prove that predictions are dominated by two patterns and a frontal bias. The majority of adults correctly predict that, from a central viewpoint, the space reflected in a mirror expands beyond the orthogonal projections to both its edges. For eccentric viewpoints, half of the participants expected a different (correct) behavior, while the other half also predicted, in this case, expansion at both edges. This means that, contrary to what happens in reality, they expected the mirror to show the space that is orthogonally in front of it and also beyond it, whatever the position of the observer (frontal bias). The error also persisted after the observation of a real reflection. However, this was not found to be true with windows. Performance improved when participants were asked to recognize the correct answer out of a series of alternatives (in this condition, only a quantitative error persisted). In both tasks (production and recognition of the correct response), people relied on imagination or memory and not on the application of the optical rule that angle of reflection equals the angle of incidence. (Contains 9 figures and 2 footnotes.)

The estimation of head size among healthy people is investigated using four experiments. Findings reveal that overestimation of own head size occurs when visual information is not given. How people estimate their head size relative to the heads of others is also analyzed.

This study aims to investigate the hypothesis that "thinking in opposites" might facilitate insight problem solving. For example, if the image relating to a problem is oriented horizontally, it may be that making it vertical makes it easier to see the solution. We focus on visuo-spatial insight problem solving and study four conditions (training vs. hint, overt vs. covert identification of opposites) which differ in terms of the participants' awareness of how considering the opposites relating to a problem might lead to possible representational transformations which would help them in their search for the solution. The training condition was associated with a greater proportion of correctly solved problems. Participants who found the solution after training also made fewer attempts and did it in a shorter time. Furthermore, they referred more frequently to the instructions they had received to use opposites and made more use of the opposites they had listed in their initial exploration (overt listing condition). Overall the results show that suggesting to the participants that they "think in opposites" worked better when it was proposed as an explicit, systematic strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]