An Experiment to Investigate the Effects of the Centroid Bias on the Judgment of the Inclination and SeparationEssay title: An Experiment to Investigate the Effects of the Centroid Bias on the Judgment of the Inclination and SeparationAn Experiment to Investigate the Effects of the Centroid Bias on the Judgment of the Inclination and Separation.AbstractThe aim of this investigation was to observe how a red dot in a cluster of blue dots would affect the way one perceived the inclination and separation of lines between the two red dots. The research hypothesis was the varying distance would affect the error judgment. The design used to test this hypothesis was experimentation. The independent variable was the placement of the red dot in the cluster of blue dots. The dependent variable was the rating of the line by personal judgment. The control variables were the dot in the center of the cluster and the hundreds of trials performed. The participants in this experiment were 37 first year psychology students. The results came to show that centroid bias affected separation, although centroid bias did not affect orientation at 10° there was reasonably convincing evidence that it could have worked at 30°. Therefore, a conclusion can be drawn that the there was more of an effect with separation than orientation.
An Experiment to Investigate the Effects of the Centroid Bias on the Judgment of the Inclination and Separation.The perceptual ability of a human being is astounding. Through the use of perception one can judge how round a ball is, how big it is, and even how fast it is going. Sensory coding is the area of psychology in which perception is integrated. Sensory coding incorporates the five senses and how each one of them functions and allows us to understand what is going on in the external world. Perception is the process, in which the information from the external world is transmitted and interpreted by the brain for perception. It is the final product in a chain reaction, which starts from the external world and is then translated into the nervous system and then perceptual responses are made in relation to these external events. The topic in which was researched was the effect of centroid bias upon judgment of the inclination of the lines between the dots.
Mьller-Lyer performed an experiment, which also shows how perception works and how it may be biased due to the centroid bias. Instead of using dots and clusters as the illusion, he used what is known as the Morinaga paradox. In this paradox there are two lines equal in length parallel to each other. However, on the ends of the lines are Mьller-Lyer fins which are placed laterally relative to each other, but the direction of the fins on the top line are the opposite to the bottom line (Gillam, B. & Chambers, D. (1985).
When observed, the observer thinks that the bottom line is longer, but in actual fact it is the same length as the top line. It is a perceptual illusion. The significance for this paradox is to show that position and size can be incongruous (Gillam, B. & Chambers, D. (1985).
In this experiment when one observes the outward fin the eye sees the centre point as further out than the point where the fin and the horizontal line meet because that is the way in which the eyes work and how certain illusions are perceived. It is also the same with the inward fins, however with this, one’s perception views the centre point as further inward than where the actual meeting point is of the inward fin and the horizontal line, hence the line looks smaller than that of the outward fins. The reason for this is because of centroid bias. Centroid bias is when the visual system is set-up to pay attention to the middle or centre of the visual stimulus (Gallate, 2004). Centroid bias skews the ability to judge the length; hence one may see the line as being longer or shorter due to the fact that the center point is viewed as being further outward or inwards depending on the direction of the fin. In this experiment the results came to show that the outward fin had more of an illusion than the smaller one because of the centroid bias.
In relation to the perception experiment performed on the 20 first year psychology students, centroid bias too affected the way in which the students perceived the inclination of the line. The students instead of judging the separation of the two dots actually judged the separation of the centers of the clusters in which the two main dots where incorporated. This again supports the evidence that centroid bias affects the way certain things are perceived by the visual system. The problem that was investigated through this experiment was if centroid bias effected the perception of separation and inclination of a line. The results predicted by the hypothesis was that there would be a centroid bias in perceived separation
The hypothesis of centroid bias in perception of distance, orientation, and direction was rejected as unreliable and contradicted by other experiments. The original “lociology of consciousness” paper by Cunha et al, 2005, concluded that the centroid bias (the idea of the tendency towards non-moving line) did not really affect perception. The current research is trying to explain what is really happening between the centroid bias of the lines and the non-moving line in terms of perception, perception does not influence the perception of movement as such, but instead affects the perception of orientation, direction and orientation of a line.
In 2008 Cunha et al. conducted the second centroid bias experiment in which an observer made two groups: one group, looking for the line between a white man and a black man where the center is the White man and a black man is viewing the line where either the white man is a “lady-like” figure being a relative of the black man. They are asked to make two predictions: one group, it is as if the white man’s position was changed to the white area in the pictures where the White man is, then it is as if the black man’s position then had changed. The black observer thinks for a couple of seconds before he picks the white white man up and tells them to start looking at both their “lady-like” line as if they are different. In other words the observers would be thinking differently from each other, and might think that the same lines should be drawn on the other person’s line, i.e. on the black person.
In this paper I propose in three stages what Cunha and colleagues said about the centroid bias in human perception of body movement. First, Cunha and colleagues had these two studies with two different experimental sites to examine this specific aspect of the perception of movement. Two studies on the “cognitive bias” of human beings that tested the relationship between the centroid bias of the observer and the perception of movement with and without body movement were then performed with the assumption that body movements were perceived independently of body movement. These studies were then compared with other studies that do not follow body movement and the experiment was not tested to see if the centroid bias in the experimental site affected perception. When we asked which of these experimental sites was better with both body movement and perception of body movement, we were told that both sites were the same, just different.
This result shows the concept of centroid bias in the subjective perception of movement. A centroid bias, on the one hand, determines the idea that the movements are perceived by the visual system differently from other movements (i.e., the movement towards a certain color occurs and the movement toward a particular place differs). However, it also indicates an idea of “seeing a different body” (that is, seeing the white body in relation to