Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 23, 2026

A Psychophysics Paradigm for the Collection and Analysis of Similarity Judgments
Published on: March 1, 2022
Pairwise comparisons and visual perceptions of equal area polygons
Abstract:
The number of studies related to visual perception has been plentiful in recent years. Participants rated the areas of five randomly generated shapes of equal area, using a reference unit area that was displayed together with the shapes. Respondents were 179 university students from Canada and Poland. The average error estimated by respondents using the unit square was 25.75%. The error was substantially decreased to 5.51% when the shapes were compared to one another in pairs. This gain of 20.24% for this two-dimensional experiment was substantially better than the 11.78% gain reported in the previous one-dimensional experiments. This is the first statistically sound two-dimensional experiment demonstrating that pairwise comparisons improve accuracy.
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