Question

When people look at a photograph of an adult-child pair and are told that the two individuals are parent and child, the people tend to say the pair looks more alike than people who are told the pair is unrelated. This is MOST likely due to:

a. precognition.
b. shape constancy.
c. perceptual sets.
d. sensory adaptation.

Answer 1

Perceptual sets

Step-by-step explanation:

In psychology, a perceptual set is a predisposition to perceive things in a certain way.

This is a tendency to perceive some aspects of the available sensory data and ignore others. For example, the perceiver has certain expectations and focuses his/her attention on some particular aspects of the data available.

In this example, when people look at a photograph of an adult-child pair and are told that the two of them are parent and child, people tend to say they look more alike than when they are told the pair is unrelated.

This piece of information given to the people, affects the way they perceive the photographs and how much the people on them look alike since they have a predisposition to perceive things this way (because of what they are told)

Thus, this would be an example of perceptual set.