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Perspective Convergence Of Relative Size Driver

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Other cars are more likely to pull out in front of your car, because they are using their previous judgement and knowledge estimating approximately how far away a car is in the distance. This is based on the distance between themselves and the headlights. The other drivers are using the familiar size cue which is the judgement of distance for an object based on prior knowledge. Drivers are judging your vehicles distance down the road based on what they already know from driving experience. Because your headlights are closer together, it is making them look like they are at the distance of a standard vehicle, when in reality you are much closer. This is due to the fact that we perceive cars with headlights being closer together, as farther …show more content…

During the day, drivers still use the familiar size of the vehicle, but now they can look at the entire vehicle where at night, they could only view the headlights. They can compare the size of the vehicle in the distance to prior knowledge of other vehicles to help determine the distance away the vehicle is. Another cue that other drivers use to perceive the distance of the other vehicle is perspective convergence. Perspective convergence is when you look down a parallel area, (in this instance the road) that appears to be convergent in the distance. When you look down a parallel road, you are enhancing the perception of depth through the cue of relative size. Relative size is based off of how much of your visual field the object you are looking at takes up. When looking far down the road, the vehicle seems to appear smaller because it is taking up less of your visual field (seeing more of the surrounding than the car), thus making the inference that the car is farther away in the distance because normal cars do not look that …show more content…

For my experiment, I was looking to test the people’s perception for a particular basketball. People generally know the size of a basketball or what a basketball looks like, so it is a good general item. How I would conduct the experiment would be to have different pictures with the basketball in a particular scene. For example, I would have one picture that shows a basketball court in a park. There would be a man playing basketball next to a basketball hoop with an extremely large basketball. I would have another picture that would be of the same context (basketball court in a park) but in this picture, the basketball would be extremely small next to the basketball player and the hoop. For my variables in this study, the independent variable would be the different sizes of the basketball in the given picture. My dependent variable would be observer’s perception of the distance of the basketball. By changing the size of the basketball, I can make the depth of the ball look different each time (farther away or

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