Perception Lab

Join tcplot for a science-fair morning: we're replicating the classic experiments of visual perception, headlined by Cleveland & McGill's famous 1984 graphical-perception study — the one that turned "pie charts are worse than bar charts" from an opinion into a measurement.

How it works: solo or in small teams, pick an experiment from the menu — the Cleveland & McGill replication (the flagship), a Gestalt grouping duel, pop-out vs. hunting, change blindness, just-noticeable differences, ensemble perception, or the area-guessing booth. Skim the original paper, write a protocol, and build the experiment as a small web app (AI assistants encouraged — these are lovely one-hour builds).
Then we swap: every station puts up a QR code, everyone rotates through everyone else's experiment as a subject, and answers stream into one shared dataset. We close by charting the room's own perceptual profile against the published results. Did we reproduce 1984? Where do we beat the Bell Labs subjects, and where are we embarrassingly human?

Bring a laptop.

For anyone who has ever repeated "position beats angle beats area" and wondered where it came from. You'll leave having checked it against your own visual cortex — and having built, run, and visualized a real experiment in one morning.