Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Despite constantly using energy and having extensive interactions with household appliances, people consistently mis-estimate the amount of energy that is used by home appliances. This poses major problems for conservation efforts, while also presenting an interesting case study in human perception. Since many forms of energy used are not directly perceptible, and since the amount of energy that is being used by an appliance is often difficult to infer from appearances alone, people often rely on cues. Some of these cues are more reliable than others and previous literature has investigated which of these cues people rely on. However, past literature has always studied these proximal cues in isolation— despite the fact that, during real-world perception, people are always integrating a variety of cues. Here, we investigate how people rely on a variety of cues, and how individual differences in the reliance on those cues predicts the ability to estimate home energy use.