Online material : Distribution of data as a function of MCS intensity and distance; additional information about the intensity residuals and the applied statistical tests. It is well known that perception of transitory effects is quite dependent on an observer’s location. The perception of an earthquake depends on whether the observer is located on a lower or upper floor within a building. Inside a building, all other things being equal, there are some specific factors that increase the perception of macroseismic effects. Macroseismic scales propose only a qualitative approximate description of the varying effects felt at lower or upper floors. For example, the Mercalli-Cancani-Sieberg (MCS) (Sieberg 1930) and the Modified Mercalli Intensity (MMI) (Wood and Neumann 1931) scales describe the second degree as “Felt only by a few people, extremely susceptible, in perfectly quiet situations, almost always on the upper floors of buildings.” The European Macroseismic Scale (EMS) (Grunthal 1998) describes the seventh degree as “Many find it difficult to stand, especially on upper floors.” Moreover, the recommended practice is “to discount all reports from observers higher than the fifth floor when assigning intensity” (Grunthal 1998). These descriptions highlight the influence of upper floors, which are expected to enhance the effects of an earthquake compared with the lower floors, and consequently recommend the exclusion of data coming from upper floors. Another effect reported in literature is the different behavior of buildings depending on the structure height in relation to the frequency content of the seismic wave (Drimmel 1984; Kanai 1957; Celebi 2000; Balendra et al. 2002). To analyze the role of observation floor and building height on earthquake perception and to quantify these effects, we analyzed over 36,000 macroseismic questionnaires collected in Italy that reported transitory effects. Unlike research by other authors dealing with skyscraper structures in …