How do children reason about people presented over video chat? Video chat is a representation, like a picture; but is also a real social interaction (the partner sees and hears you). Do children understand the nuanced affordances and limitations of video chat? We tested 4-year-old children’s reasoning, asking if a person over video chat (vs. a live person; photograph) could see, hear, feel, and physically interact through the screen. Children judged that a person over video chat can see, but cannot feel nor receive an object, through the screen. The person over video chat was judged to hear more often than a photograph, but less often than a live person. Preschool children are not limited to considering a stimulus fully representational, or fully present; instead, they understand video chat as a medium that blurs the boundaries of representation and reality, allowing for a mixture of life-like affordances and picture-like limitations.

Many studies have investigated the roles that area and number play in visual quantity estimation. Yet, recent work has shown that perceived area is not equal to true, mathematical area. This simple fact calls into question many findings in numerical cognition and suggests a new theoretical perspective: that area estimation plays a dominant role in visual quantity estimation. We examine two ‘case studies’: (1) a ‘general magnitude’ account of visual quantity estimation, which posits bi-directional influences between area and number. In contrast with prior work, controlling for perceived area reveals a unidirectional relation between area and number (Experiments 1 and 2), and (2) acuity of area and number estimation (Experiment 3). We show how an understanding of the perception of area forces a reevaluation of several findings concerning the relative acuity of number and area estimation. Combined, and in contrast to many prior studies, our findings suggest a dominant role of area in visual quantity estimation.