5. People Imagine Objects Tilted and at a Slight Angle Above

Video (video/mp4)

I asked my Mom to draw a picture of a coffee cup, and there were a lot of chances that she will draw from a perspective slightly above the cup looking down. And you know, that's how she has drawn it. This has been dubbed the canonical perspective.   Very few people would draw a coffee cup as on picture below, which is what you’d see if you were looking at a coffee cup from above.      

Cup (binary/octet-stream)

The research asked people to identify various animals, such as a very small dog or cat. The canonical perspective still won out, even though we most often see cats or very small dogs from high above, not just slightly above (unless you crawl around on the ground a lot). It seems to be a universal trait that we think about, remembers, imagines, and recognize objects from this canonical perspective.