Russell Jackson: CSU San Marcos Department of Psychology

Distance perception is among the most ubiquitous psychological phenomena known. Humans utilize distance estimation during all waking hours and even when sleeping. Distance perception likely takes place to this same extent in most other animals and distance perception also occurs in many non-animal species.

Furthermore, distance perception is one of the oldest researched topics in modern behavioral science. The most commonly cited founding of modern psychological science dates to Wundt’s investigations of distance perception in the late 1800s. Distance perception is among the most common mental tasks and has been investigated since the founding of psychology.

Unfortunately, some of the most important questions about distance perception remain unanswered. How and why do we perceive distances the way that we do? Why is distance perception sometimes wildly inaccurate? Why are there such big individual differences in distance perception? We have yet to answer to these questions well.

Recent application of evolution by natural selection has yielded novel insights to these questions. I will discuss recent evidence from several empirical studies that discovered large magnitude visual effects, including illusions, in everyday distance perception. These illusions appear to occur constantly throughout human experiences and reach magnitudes of nearly a factor of two. These findings also illuminate a potential cause for the most prevalent, but least acknowledged, finding of all distance perception research.