Illusion Susceptibility and Adaptation to the Marine Environment

Abstract

The relatively flat and featureless marine environment makes unique perceptual demands on fishermen who must make distance judgments in order to locate themselves with respect to available resources. Past research has found that perceptual adaptation to one environment (e.g., a carpentered environment) can result in perceptual erors in another (e.g., judging line lengths on the Muller-Lyer Illusion). This paper provides a strong test of the environmental hypothesis by interrelating years of experience as a fisherman with susceptibility to the horizontal-vertical illusion among small-scale fishermen in the Gulf of Nicoya, Costa Rica.