During my fleeting time here in Paris, I have made it my personal mission to visit the Eiffel Tower as many times as possible (Fig. 1). It began one of the first days I was here when I decided to go for a morning run. Not having any particular place to go, I decided to run to the Eiffel Tower and back, which came to about 3 miles exactly with a short selfie break in the middle. The next day, I didn’t want to use up any data mapping my way around the area, so I ran the same path again, and took another selfie. The same thing happened the day after that. It has actually become a small comfort for me, and I am now known as the tall, sweaty girl in the coffee shop at the end of the street that always comes in early in the morning, out of breath, and never having perfect change.
My initial impression of the Eiffel Tower was that it was not as big as I thought. However, I was also extremely disappointed by the size of the Christ the Redeemer statue in Brazil, so maybe I just have unrealistic expectations of national monuments. I suppose I will have to visit the Statue of Liberty at some point to confirm. Nonetheless, I have since found that on some days and from certain vantage points, the Eiffel Tower begins to look larger, downright massive at times. I would have thought the opposite would happen, as I got used to seeing it almost every day, so I looked into what this phenomenon may be. A 2011 study by Eerland et al. was published in Psychological Science examining the effects of body posture on size estimation. They specifically had their participants estimate the height of the Eiffel Tower when unknowingly being tilted to the left or the right (about a 2% change in body weight distribution). They actually found significant results (Fig. 2), with participants estimating the Eiffel Tower to be 12 meters shorter when leaning to the left than when leaning to the right (Eerland, Guadalupe, & Zwaan, 2011).
However, I am not sure I buy their discussion of the results. They cite possible influences of visual field associations. Specifically, previous work that suggests people imagine numbers on linear scale, with small numbers occurring on the left and larger numbers on the right. It has been further found that people associate smaller numbers with their left hand and left visual field and larger numbers with their right hand and right visual field (Eerland, Guadalupe, & Zwaan, 2011). The extent to which this is reflected in such a small bodily displacement is what makes me skeptical. However, their results do suggest possible bodily effects on cognition and attribution. A review by Dr. Lawrence W. Barsalou, who is actually an Emory psychology professor, describes a similar concept known as grounded cognition. This is the understanding of cognition, not as a separate higher order entity based solely on semantic memory, but as a process rooted in bodily states and ongoing mental processes. In other words, there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that your knowledge and cognitive states are influenced by other processes such as action, perception, and introspection (Barsalou, 2008). This might help explain my ever-changing impression of the Eiffel Tower.
Works Cited:
Barsalou, L. W. (2008). Grounded Cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 59(1), 617-645. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.59.103006.093639
Eerland, A., Guadalupe, T. M., & Zwaan, R. A. (2011). Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller. Psychological Science, 22(12), 1511-1514. doi:10.1177/0956797611420731