If I asked you to draw a full-size outline of your head on a flip chart, and then to draw the outline of your head as it appears in the mirror, would you draw the two outlines the same size? You shouldn’t do because the mirror image of your head (as it appears to you) is exactly half its true size, irrespective of how far you are from the mirror, a fact that few people realise. That’s according to a new study published in Cognition by Marco Bertamini and Theodore Parks at the Universities of Liverpool and California.
They also found that most people believe the mirror image of their own head will grow smaller as they move away from the mirror – it doesn’t it stays the same. Yet most participants correctly realised that if they watched the mirror image of another person’s head, it would get smaller as that other person moved away from the mirror. Finally, only a minority of participants realised that the size of the mirror image of another person’s head would get bigger as they, the participant, moved away from the mirror. Confused? Me too.
Link to study abstract