Number Association Bias

Figure 1. Two football players, both the same size. One is perceived as skinnier than the other due to the lower number on their jersey.

Visual perception can be affected by cognition. It has been shown that numbers associated with objects or people can change perceived attributes. For instance, in one study, observers were presented, on each trial, with a picture of a computer-generated football player and asked to rate the slenderness of the player on an analog scale. The results of two experiments showed that observers perceived athletes wearing small jersey numbers as more slender than those with high numbers. This finding suggests that the cognition of numbers quantitatively alters body size perception.

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