In The Eye of The Beholder: The Perception of Indeterminate Art

Abstract

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.

Task-dependent eye-movement patterns in viewing art

“…Error bars correspond to 95% confidence intervals. The paintings with the highest absolute familiarity value (painting by Balthasar van der Ast ( 29 )) and with the lowest absolute familiarity value (painting by Paul Gauguin ( 6 )) are shown on the right.…”

“…Numerous different tasks have been used to explore task-dependent visual selection while viewing art, including free viewing (Koide et al, 2015;Pang et al, 2013), judging the aesthetic quality (Fudali-Czyż et al, 2018;Massaro et al, 2012;Molnar, 1981;Pihko et al, 2011), paying attention to semantic content (Molnar, 1981), memorization (Zangemeister et al, 1995), categorization and person detection (Wallraven et al, 2008), movement detection (Massaro et al, 2012). Despite the diversity of tasks, to the best of our knowledge no common art historian tasks have yet been used to examine task-driven viewing patterns while looking at paintings.…”

Beyond Representation in Virtual Reality: The Abstract Art of Jane LaFarge Hamill and Kevin Mack

“…That's how abstract painting works" [11]. Pepperell produced indeterminate works for studies at the Department of Neuroradiology, University of Zurich [12] and the Max Planck Institute [13]. The various results contradicted previous studies [14] that non-art audiences prefer representational images, since subjects gave equal aesthetic ratings to the indeterminate stimuli.…”

Connecting Art and the Brain: An Artist's Perspective on Visual Indeterminacy

“…Separate studies conducted by Wallraven et al ( 2007a , b ) at the Max Planck Institute used the same indeterminate paintings employed in the previous studies, but this time subjected them to a range of psychophysical tests using eye-tracking and categorization tasks. The purpose was to look at the ways subjects would react to indeterminate stimuli, and also to see if there were any empirical grounds for verifying my own intentions in making my art.…”