A computer program to study the area perception of squares and rectangles

A computerized approach to study the visual perception of rectangles and squares is proposed. A program has been used for comparison of these two figures when one of them is fixed in size while the other is varied actively by a subject to match the area of the fixed one. The final errors on area and on perimeter made by the subject are computed for each pair of presented figures. The program is menu driven and thus easy to use by the investigator. Since the task procedure is very simple and non-obtrusive to the subjects, it can be used both for children and adults as well as for normal and brain impaired subjects in order to study some perceptive and cognitive functions. This program recognizes the most common graphics cards used by computers running under MS-DOS to adjust the parameters of the presented figures according to the pixel resolution of the graphics card. Quick-BASIC was used to write the program which was compiled by Microsoft Professional Basic 7.0 compiler.