Abstract
The notion of body-based scaling suggests that our body and its action capabilities are used to scale the spatial layout of the environment. Here we present four studies supporting this perspective by showing that the hand acts as a metric which individuals use to scale the apparent sizes of objects in the environment. However to test this, one must be able to manipulate the size and/or dimensions of the perceiver’s hand which is difficult in the real world due to impliability of hand dimensions. To overcome this limitation, we used virtual reality to manipulate dimensions of participants’ fully-tracked, virtual hands to investigate its influence on the perceived size and shape of virtual objects. In a series of experiments, using several measures, we show that individuals’ estimations of the sizes of virtual objects differ depending on the size of their virtual hand in the direction consistent with the body-based scaling hypothesis. Additionally, we found that these effects were specific to participants’ virtual hands rather than another avatar’s hands or a salient familiar-sized object. While these studies provide support for a body-based approach to the scaling of the spatial layout, they also demonstrate the influence of virtual bodies on perception of virtual environments.
Highlights
The influence of perceivers’ bodies on perception was originally introduced by Gibson [1], who stressed that individuals do not perceive the environment, but rather they perceive the relationship between their body and the environment
To big Alice, the objects surrounding her have become miniature; to small Alice, the objects surrounding her have become massive
In a set of studies, we investigated the influence of the dimensions of a self-representing virtual hand on the perception of size and shape of objects within a virtual environment
Summary
The influence of perceivers’ bodies on perception was originally introduced by Gibson [1], who stressed that individuals do not perceive the environment, but rather they perceive the relationship between their body and the environment. Long before the child can discriminate one inch, or two, or three, he can see the fit of the object to the pincer-like action of the opposable thumb The child learns his scale of sizes as commensurate with his body, not with a measuring stick In an attempt to remedy this frightful situation, Alice eats a bite of a cake labeled “Eat Me” after which she grows to a height of nine feet tall. These changes provide a striking illustration of how the size of one’s body can affect the ability to interact with objects in the surrounding environment. Drawing from Gibson’s [1] account, one could hypothesize that in the same physical surroundings, big Alice and little Alice perceive two distinctly different spatial environments, because the interactive value of the objects of which the environment is composed drastically differs following a change in the relationship between Alice’s size and the size of the environment
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