Question

Billy wants to show Jean his new stove-pipe hat that he purchased for his Abraham Lincoln costume. He carefully sets the hat in a box and closes the top flaps. When Jean opens the box, she doesn't lift the hat out of the box and only looks down at it to see a black felt circle, not the whole hat. She knows that it's the hat though, because of this constancy

Answer 1

Jean recognizes Billy's stove-pipe hat purchased for his costume using perceptual constancy, a principle allowing recognition of objects under varying conditions.

Step-by-step explanation:

Billy wants to show Jean his new stove-pipe hat that he purchased for his Abraham Lincoln costume. When Jean opens the box to look at the hat, she recognizes it merely from the top view as a black felt circle. Jean's ability to recognize the hat despite only seeing a fraction of it relies on a psychological principle known as perceptual constancy. This principle allows us to recognize objects regardless of the angle, distance, or lighting from which we view them. The use of contour lines to imply the existence of an object in artwork, like the outline of a hat on a figure, demonstrates a similar concept of our brain filling in the gaps based on our previous knowledge and expectations.