Against a dark or shadowed background, black fabric loses which size cue?
Show answer & explanation
Answer: Outer contour contrast
Outer contour contrast ✓ — Right. The weakened cue is the contrast at the outer contour: the edge between garment and surroundings becomes less informative. Vision research treats contours and boundaries as key cues for size and shape, so a weaker edge gives the viewer less precise size information. A clothing luminance study also reports that darker backgrounds strengthen the low-luminance thinning effect. The body and garment have not changed; the outline signal has.
Fabric stretch pressure — No. Fabric stretch pressure would be a fit cue, not an edge-contrast cue. The stem changes the relationship between black fabric and a dark surrounding field, not the force in the cloth. The cited vision sources explain why boundaries matter for size and shape. So the relevant loss is visual boundary information.
Waist-height signal — Not the best answer. Waist-height signal would matter if a belt, seam, or proportion marker moved, but the stem only changes background contrast. The supported cue is the outer contour. When the garment edge is harder to separate from the background, the size outline becomes less explicit. That is a boundary problem, not a waist-placement problem.
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