Watch your head

I read an interesting article the other day in the Lab Notes section of the Hartford Courant about people's perception of their own head sizes. According to a recent study:

People tend to overestimate the size of their own heads by 30 percent to 42 percent. So says a study appearing in the British Psychology Journal and featured recently on the British Psychological Society's blog. Here's where it gets weird: The researchers, led by Ivana Bianchi at the University of Macerata in Italy, found that people generally do a better job of estimating the size of other people's heads.

The study goes on to trace this oddity back to the 1400s, where they found that self-portrait paintings during that time usually contained subjects with larger heads than in other artwork. You can read other Lab Notes here.