Have you ever wonder how you can tell whether an object is near or far? Or how you can say that one building is taller than the other, even if in a distance they both seem to have the same height? The answer lies in Perceptual Cues. These are bits of information that we get from the object, scene or illustration that guides our perception of depth (Goldstein, 2010). Let’s take this picture for example:

Just by looking at the image, it appears that the hand is so big as to hold the girl’s body. Is there really a hand as big as the average person? Or is there really a person as small as a hand? The perceptual cue of Familiar size makes use of our knowledge and past experiences on the real size of objects, and uses this to infer the distance of objects (Goldstein, 2010). In the example, we can infer that the woman is placed far enough from the hand to make its image appear as small as that of the hand. Because in reality, we know that a person and a hand cannot be in the same size unless Dwarfina or Thumbelina comes to life.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Goldstein, E. B. (2010). Sensation and perception (8^th ed.). California, USA: Wadsworth.