The question of how humans perceive art and how the sensory percept is endowed with aesthetics by the human brain has continued to fascinate psychologists and artists alike. It seems, for example, rather easy for us to classify a work of art as either "abstract" or "representational". The artist Robert Pepperell recently has produced a series of paintings that seek to defy this classification: his goal was to convey "indeterminancy" in these paintings -scenes that at first glance look like they contain an object or belong to a certain genre but that upon closer examination escape a definite determination of their contents. Here, we report results from several psychophysical experiments using these artworks as stimuli, which seek to shed light on the perceptual processing of the degree of abstraction in images. More specifically, the task in these experiments was to categorize a briefly shown image as "abstract" or "representational". Stimuli included Pepperell's paintings each of which was paired with a similar representational work of art from several periods and several artistic genres. The results provide insights into the visual processes determining our perception of art and can also function as a "objective" validation for the intentions of the artist.

How do we interpret an object -a scene -a painting? Perception research and art illuminate from different angles how the vast amount of information in our visually perceived environment is processed by the viewer to form a coherent and consistent interpretation of the world. Using drawings and paintings by the artist Robert Pepperell, this work attempts to connect these different world views. Pepperell's paintings at first glance seem to be a baroque fresco, an expressionist still-life, or a cubist collage; taking a closer look, however, this concrete interpretation vanishes and we are left with an indeterminate painting. Using psychophysical experiments and eyetracking measures, in this work we seek to illuminate the visual processing of information in Pepperell's paintings. More specifically, we will investigate how the pattern of fixations -the loci of interest -change as a function of the task ('What is depicted in this scene?' vs. 'Does this image contain people?') and of the image content. The interpretation of the experimental results in the context of perceptual research will give first insights into the perception of (indeterminate) art. Conversely, the results are also relevant for art, as they provide a kind of perceptual, measurable 'validation' of the artist's intentions.

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