Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

“Sensibility to variation” is considered to be a significant cognitive mechanism for adaptive decision making and action. It has been demonstrated that humans as well as animals have the ability in many perceptual properties. Here we tested whether people can compare and match the variance across perceptual domain. We examined subjective equal levels of variance across different perceptual properties, size and orientation, using the method of adjustment. The size- and the orientation-adjustment tasks were conducted in a between- subjects design. The point of subjective equalities (PSE) of the three target set variance levels were obtained. The results indicate that observers could adjust the size variance according to the direction variance in the size-adjustment task and do the reverse in the direction-adjustment task, and that the relation between the variance magnitudes of the two domains is linearly related. The result implies that people can sense the magnitude of variability of set of items and match the magnitude across perceptual domains.