Scaling vision to the body: Height predicts visual experience and perceptual performance

The visual system adapts to the statistics of everyday experience, yet these statistics depend on the observer's physical body. We combined large-scale egocentric video and behavioral testing to examine how stature shapes the "visual diet" of hands and faces and how this diet affects perceptual performance. In Experiment 1, automated analyses of over 200 hr of eye-tracked egocentric video revealed that taller observers encountered faces lower in the visual field and hands higher, reflecting biomechanical constraints on gaze and posture. In Experiment 2, observers showed greater categorization accuracy to faces in the upper field and to hands in the lower field, with stature modulating these effects-shorter participants were more attuned to faces above them. These findings demonstrate that perceptual performance mirrors the embodied statistics of visual experience: The visual system is tuned not only to our shared environment but also to the vantage point of our bodies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).