Perception and Art LOs Flashcards
How can science inform art?
NO: experiencing art is subjective, scientific analysis is objective, appreciating art involves norms: science deals with facts, art is a concept: understanding it depends on conceptual study not empirical investigation
YES: art can be objectively analyzed as a stimulus, norms should be related to human cognitive and perceptual abilities, some concepts may have precise definitions and may be applied like rules.
Summarize interplay between reality and illusion from perspective of some major approaches to art since Renaissance
Renaissance (14-16th centuries): saw increased use of pictorial depth cues in painting which created greater realism.
De Stijl (20th Century): advocated for pure abstraction to reduce things to their essentials. Ignored natural colour and form, used vertical and horizontal lines an donly black/white and primary colours.
Surrealism (early 20th Century): emphasized how dreamlike states, symbols and the workings of the unconscious mind affect conscious reality. Influenced by Freud’s writings on the unconscious. Maurits Cornelis Escher wanted people to think about the nature of reality and process of visual perception, was directly affected by Gestalt Psychology
Op Art (1960s): is abstract, constructed lines or geometric patterns that affect figure-ground relationship causing tension. Results in visual illusions giving the impression of movement (kinetic art), vibration, patterns or depth and warping. Motion perception caused by microsaccades (minute involuntary eye movements), these trigger neural signals of the higher-luminance and lower-luminance signals. This discrepancy is interpreted as motion.
Trompe L’oeil: technique of creating highly realistic imagery that creates the illusion that an object is present, objects represented as actual size
Perceptual Art (late 20th, early 21st Century): viewer is active participant in the creation of the experience (eg. by literally changing their point of view) the viewing experience is as important as the subject. (magic eye autostereograms require the observer to view it in a particular way)
What is relationship among face perception, spatial frequency analysis and the Mona Lisa?
Schyns & Oliva Dr. Angry and Mr. Smile: looked at whether visual processing and categorization are independent. Does categorization occur late on an already perceived stimulus or are they intertwined with categorization cognitively penetrating early perception. Participants asked to categorize faces (eg. male vs female, facial expression vs no expression, happy vs angry vs neutral) filtered spatial frequencies in neutral, angry and happy faces: high pass filtering resulting image has sharpe, fine lines (high spatial frequencies). Low pass filtering contains blurred, large-scale luminance variations (low spatial frequencies). Combined faces to create hybrids: (a) HSF neutral female/lSF happy male face. (b) HSF angry male/LSF neutral female face. When viewed close up HSFs mask LSFs (a) appears neutral, (B) appears angry. At a distance LSF are more visible (a) appears happy, (b) appears neutral. Info extracted in parallel by neural channels with sensitivity to different spatial frequencies. Channels are not independent but interact (sharp edges mask blurred gross features), despite masking by HSFs participants were able to process faces at the appropriate level of detail to categorize them (eg. given combo HSF neutral/LSF happy face, is expression happy or angry? Cant see happy but choose it.) suggest categorization is closely bound to low-level visual processes. Recently created other hybrid images.
Harmon and Julesz (1973): Abraham Lincoln effect: block portrait is difficult to identify close-up but easily identifiable from a distance -> HSF overriding LSF. With greater distance the amount of masking produced by high spatial frequency blocks is reduced allowing low spatial frequency info to dominate.
Mona Lisa: smile of model has been described as ambiguous, enigmatic, elusive, mocking, sad, innocent and inviting. Freud interpreted smile as representation of da Vinci’s erotic attraction to his mother
Livingstone (2000): Mona Lisa’s smile is more apparent in peripheral vision rather than foveal vision. Fovea has smaller receptive fields (high spatial frequency), periphery (low spatial frequency). Filtered image with Gaussian blur spatial frequency filters in Photoshop, smile visible in low-pass image but not im high pass image. Merging both restores the smile. Da Vinci used shadows from her cheekbones (low frequency) to accentuate the corners or her mouth making her smile more distinct when viewed peripherally. There is a change in facial expression from low to high spatial frequency.
Kontsevich & Tyler (2004): visual system affected by noise, from photon noise to random neural activation; this may affect face perception including portraits. Introduced random visual noise to images of the Mona Lisa. Observers rated her facial expression on a 4-point scale from sad to happy. Manipulations had a profound effect on the observer’s rating; most expressions were meaningful. Smiling “in the eyes” depending on the smiling mouth. Supports the position that the smile in Mona Lisa is ambiguous.
Define Neuroasthetics and list Ramachandrans 10 universal laws of art
Neuroaesthetics: explanation and understanding of the esthetics of art from the perspective of neuroscience, attempts to discover universals in art and esthetics using neuroscience, visual art reveals the brain’s perceptual capabilities (law of constancy (despite variations in visual stimuli, we can determine essential properties of objects) and law of abstraction (a specific instance or representation can be generalized, due to limitations of memory)
1) Peak shift effect: first discovered in pigeons, exaggerated depictions in art are preferred
2) perceptual grouping and binding: gestalt principles of organization, discovering groupings are reinforcing may be useful in the future
3) Contrast: visual cells prefer contrasting stimuli and thus are pleasing to look at
4) Isolation: a single visual modality is selected and amplified to produce a stronger esthetic experience; serves to focus attention
5) Perceptual Problem Solving: attempting to construct an representation from an incomplete stimulus is reinforcing; being presented with the whole figure is not
6) Symmetry: visual processing prefers stimuli that are symmetrical, symmetrical faces are preferred
7) Abhorrence of coincidence/generic viewpoint: Bayesian models have been applied to low- and high-level vision (probabilistic network approach to segmentation): the visual system selects the most likely interpretation. We prefer generic viewpoints, we abhor coincidence
8) (visual) metaphor: metaphors and symbols give artworks multiple layers of meaning beyond the literal, metaphors may reduce cognitive complexity by relating a novel experience to a familiar one
9) Balance and Harmony: successful art makes use of the entire representational space; information is spread across the entire canvas. Golden ratio fits in here
10) Repetition, rhythm and orderliness: beauty is inseparable from the appearance of order; pictures filled with patterns, like subtle colour repetitions or formal rhythms appear more elegant and composed.
PRO: new way to think about esthetics and/or brain functioning, some support from neuroscience/psychology
CON: vague on a lot of the neuro part of neuroesthetics, predictive of esthetics or merely post hoc, are these laws necessary and sufficient for esthetic art
How is the Golden Ratio related to esthetic experience?
Fechner first attempted to explain beauty in terms of the golden ratio
The golden ratio is the sum of two quantities: larger quantity::Larger:smaller (eg. (a+b):a::a:b, a/b = (a+b)/a) or 1.6180339887:1
Aka as the golden section, golden mean, or golden number or the divine proportion
Also seen in Fibonacci series: every number after the first two is the sum of the two preceding ones, dividing each number by the one before it approximates the golden ratio
Applied explicitly in art and architecture since the Renaissance (eg. Parthenon, rule of third in photography)
Evidence showing golden ratio underlies aestehtic properties is equivocal
Di Dio et al (2007): observers naive to art criticism placed in fMRI while viewing images of Classical and Renaissance sculptures. Stimuli: canonical (original) or modified images. Canonical images all had golden ratio among body parts. Viewing conditions: observation, aesthetic judgment. Analysis: compared brain responses to canonical and modified sculptures, compared brain responses to beautiful and ugly sculptures. Canonical images were strongly preferred over modified images. 1) Canonical sculptures activated right insula (mediates emotions; connects to/from amygdala): Evidence for objective beauty (“I can see why people like that) 2) beautiful images activated right amygdala (responds to learned emotional information): evidence for subjective beauty (“I like that”). Conclusion: both of these non-mutually exclusive processes contribute to appreciation of artwork
How can art inform science?
Visual art reveals that there is an alternative physics in our minds that differs from the rules that apply to the real world
Artists reveal that our brains use a simpler, reduced physics to understand the world
Cast shadows: inconsistent direction of lighting is not readily noticed, artists may treat shadows like paint overlapping them as if they were opaque. Shadows must be darker to create 3-D structure
Boundaries: lines do not divide objects from their backgrounds in the real world, however much of art including some of the earliest recorded art uses line drawings, artists don’t simply trace brightness discontinuities but outline the contours that characterize shape.
Transparency: artists stimulate transparency by crossing the contours of the transparent object with the contours of the background. Gross deviations from the optics of refraction are rarely noticed by the viewer; the brain must not compute those object properties. X-junctions are critical for the successful depiction of transparency
Completion: our brains are able to fill in gaps and construct meaningful images from fragments
Three dimensionality: we can accurately interpret images that are less than 3-D; this indicates that we do not experience the visual world as truly 3-D (if we did paintings would not exist; all art would be sculpture), as long as an image is flat, it does not seem distorted; if its folded our perception is altered when its tilted, this tolerance of flat representations is found in all cultures, infants and in other species
Reflections: art reveals that we have no visual knowledge of mirrors or reflection, the Venus effect (paintings depict a person apparently looking at their own reflection, but the mirror shows the subject looking at the observer which is impossible according to the laws of optics), size misperception: your reflection in a mirror is actually half your physical size also your distance from the mirror does not change the size of your body’s reflection on its surface
