Through the looking-glass: Objects in the mirror are less real

Abstract

Is an object reflected in a mirror perceived differently from an object that is seen directly? We asked observers to label “everything” in photographs of real-world scenes. Some scenes contained a mirror in which objects could be seen. Reflected objects received significantly fewer labels than did their nonreflected counterparts. If an object was visible only as a reflection, it was labeled more often than a reflected object that appeared both as a reflection and nonreflected in the room. These unique reflected objects were still not labeled more often than the unique nonreflected objects in the room. In a second experiment, we used a change blindness paradigm in which equivalent object chan..