Psychophysics for perception of (in)determinate art

Abstract

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.

Perceptual and Physiological Responses to Jackson Pollock's Fractals

“…For example, the spontaneous gaze behavior in viewing artworks seems to follow a “coarse-to-fine” strategy where an initial global sweep of the image is followed by a later period of visual scrutiny of finer local details (Locher et al, 2007 ). Furthermore, the points of high salience computed in terms of local feature differences in luminance, color and orientation were found to drive eye fixations in viewing abstract and representational artworks (Wallraven et al, 2007 ; DiPaola et al, 2010 ; Foulsham and Kingstone, 2010 ; Fuchs et al, 2011 ). Based on these investigations, how the eye scans across Pollock's patterns, which lack obvious salient features and which scale across multiple sizes, is of obvious interest.…”

Artistic representations: Clues to efficient coding in human vision

“…We note that one group performed experiments using rapid categorization that explored the processing of abstraction in painting (Wallraven et al, 2007). These experiments showed that the "indeterminate" artwork of Robert Pepperell showed significant differences in terms of reaction time for categorization compared to more representational artworks.…”

The perception of art and the science of perception

“…My ongoing research into the scientific background relating to visual indeterminacy led me to collaborate with two groups of vision scientists, one at Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics 36 and the other at the University of Zürich. 5 The purpose was to subject the viewers of my paintings to a series of psychophysical, behavioural and neurobiological tests in order to investigate their responses to visually indeterminate images.…”