Size vs. Material: testing possible implicit associations with expected weight

The purpose of this thesis is to illustrate a research on weight illusions that I conducted under the supervision of dr. Michele Vicovaro (Department of General Psychology, at University of Padua). We investigated the possibility of implicit association mediating the effects of respectively the size weight illusion (SWI) and the material weight illusions (MWI), to see if the hypothesis of the expectation model, currently the most widely accepted account for these illusions, could still be considered valid despite the fact that it cannot explain several dilemmas arising when comparing the two illusions. The hypothesis of this implicit mechanisms mediating the illusions was first advanced by Buckingham (2014) but has never been tested empirically until now. In order to test this hypothesis, we devised and administer three experiments using the IAT, a test designed to measure the strength of the implicit associations the subject has while reacting to a set of stimuli. In the first two experiments the aim was to see if the implicit association hypothesis could explain the two illusions separately, while in the third one we combined the two properties to see if it could as well explain the problems arising when comparing the two properties together. In this dissertation we start by reviewing the existent literature regarding both the illusion and the IAT and then analyzed the data obtained through the experiments to test our hypothesis.