Journal of Vision (2020) 20(3):6, 1–14 1 Effects of content and viewing distance on the preferred size of moving images Masamitsu Harasawa Science and Technology Research Laboratories, Japan Broadcasting Corporation, Tokyo, Japan Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan Yasuhito Sawahata Science and Technology Research Laboratories, Japan Broadcasting Corporation, Tokyo, Japan Kazuteru Komine Science and Technology Research Laboratories, Japan Broadcasting Corporation, Tokyo, Japan Satoshi Shioiri Research Institute of Electrical Communication, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan While visual size preferences regarding still objects have been investigated and linked to the “canonical size” effect—where preferred on-screen size was significantly related to objects’ real-world size—the visual size preferences related to moving images of natural scenes has not been researched. In this study, we measured the preferred size of moving images of natural scenes and short duration and investigated the effect of viewing distance on size preferences. Our results showed that the preferred size varied strongly depending on content, and we found moving images’ canonical size effect. The preferred size in images of scenery was significantly larger than in images of persons, and there was a positive correlation between the preferred size and the real-world physical size of the main subjects in the images. When the viewing distance was doubled, the preferred size increased about 10% as a ratio to screen size—in contrast to the findings of a previous study. While the rationale for these findings is not yet clear, our analysis suggests that neither the motion component in the images nor the nature of their background area are contributing factors. We suggest that environment, viewing distance, and screen size may contribute to this effect. Introduction Our behavior is often infuenced by aesthetic preferences. There are numerous studies on the relationship between visual aesthetic judgments and preferences with visual features such as color (Granger, 1955; Guilford & Smith, 1959; Hurlbert & Ling, 2007; McManus, Jones, & Cottrell, 1982; Palmer & Schloss, 2010), spatial frequency (Graham & Field, 2007; Graham & Redies, 2010), orientation (Latto & Russell-Duf, 2002), and size (Konkle & Oliva, 2011; Linsen, Leyssen, Sammartino, & Palmer, 2011). Such visual preferences often afect our behavior. For example, where to sit in a movie theater, where to stand in an art gallery, or where to move to enjoy a better view of an item of interest can be related to our visual preferences about size. Several studies have investigated visual preferences regarding object size in pictures (Bertamini, Bennett, & Bode, 2011; Konkle & Oliva, 2011; Kosslyn, 1978; Linsen et al., 2011) and demonstrated that there is a canonical size for objects, which has a certain relationship to the size of the object in the real world. Konkle and Oliva (2011) found that the preferred visual size of the picture of an object is proportional to the logarithm of its known physical size. In their experiments, participants performed several diferent tasks: viewing pictures of objects of diferent physical sizes within a frame, drawing objects, evaluating the size of imagined objects, and adjusting the size of displayed objects. All experiments consistently showed that smaller objects in the real world (e.g., strawberries or a key) were preferred to be smaller within the frame, whereas larger objects (e.g., piano or car) were preferred to be larger; this was termed canonical size efect. Linsen et al. (2011) showed a very similar trend in a diferent experiment. Their participants observed two images surrounded by square frames containing the same object in random sizes relative to the frame and chose one of the two according to their aesthetic Citation: Harasawa, M., Sawahata, Y., Komine, K., & Shioiri, S. (2020). Effects of content and viewing distance on the preferred size of moving images. Journal of Vision, 20(3):6, 1–14, https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.20.3.6. https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.20.3.6 Received August 16, 2019; published March 24, 2020 ISSN 1534-7362 Copyright 2020 The Authors This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Downloaded from jov.arvojournals.org on 07/24/2020