CHICAGO, Feb. 28 (Xinhua) -- A study of the University of Chicago (UChicago) proposes that boundary contraction may be just as common as boundary extension, and that whether something appears zoomed in or out depends on the properties of the image itself.
Researchers conducted an online experiment using a broad set of 1,000 images and 2,000 participants, letting the participants see an image, a scrambled image and then the original image again. They found that people would indicate it being farther or closer according to its visual properties, even though the final image was identical to the first.
They also found that although images of objects caused boundary extension, images of full scenes were more likely to produce boundary contraction.
That is, a person may see a close-up photo of an apple and fill in details that were not actually present. But if they see a football field, they may be more likely to remove details -- zooming in, or contracting, the actual image.
The results highlight the need for psychologists to revisit long-held assumptions, as well as the potential pitfalls of drawing larger inferences from limited data sets.
The idea behind the boundary extension is that when people remember images, they fill in the edges with details they did not actually see. It has become a widely accepted term in psychology classes, textbooks and test-prep flashcards, and has been used to make other claims about the nature of the brain, such as the function of the hippocampus.
The study has been published in the journal Current Biology.
