Through the looking-glass: Objects in the mirror are less real

Is an object reflected in a mirror perceived differently from an object that is seen directly? We asked observers to label “everything” in photographs of real-world scenes. Some scenes contained a mirror in which objects could be seen. Reflected objects received significantly fewer labels than did their nonreflected counterparts. If an object was visible only as a reflection, it was labeled more often than a reflected object that appeared both as a reflection and nonreflected in the room. These unique reflected objects were still not labeled more often than the unique nonreflected objects in the room. In a second experiment, we used a change blindness paradigm in which equivalent object changes occurred in the nonreflected and reflected parts of the scene. Reaction times were longer and accuracy was lower for finding the changes in reflections. These results suggest that reflected information is easily discounted when processing images of natural scenes.