| Abstract: Objects in the real world can be viewed from a range of distances, and thus can subtend a range of angles in the visual field. Is there a visual size which is preferred? First, we showed that observers are remarkably consistent in selecting a canonical visual size to view real-world objects, which reflects the object’s physical size in the world and not simply acuity constraints. When a second group of observers thought of the same images as toys, the selected visual angles were smaller, verifying that the canonical size is driven by the conceptual size of objects. In a second experiment, we used a memory test and demonstrated that observers have a systematic bias towards the canonical size. Together, these results support a scale-dependent object representation centered around a canonical visual size, which relies on knowledge of the physical size of objects in the world.
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