Aesthetic preference of oriented content in broadband images

Williams, H.; Schweinhart, April; O’Keefe, Eleanor; Haun, Andrew M.; Essock, Edward A.

doi:10.1167/12.9.1084

Cited by 1 publication

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“…Thus, analysis of visual art may be a way to obtain hints about the processing/encoding of the visual system; if particular structural relations are important for humans to perceive a scene, then the relations should also be contained in an effective painting. Some researchers (Haun et al 2006;Latto et al 2000;Melcher and Bacci 2008;Zeki 1999) even suggest that art that drives basic encoding of neural elements more is more aesthetically pleasing, and others have suggested that art that matches the structure of natural scenes is more pleasing to human viewers (Alvarez-Ramirez et al 2008;Fernandez and Wilkins 2008;Graham and Field 2007;Haun et al 2006;Juricevic et al 2010;Koch et al 2010;Latto et al 2000;Redies et al 2007aRedies et al , 2007bSpehar et al 2003;Taylor et al 1999Taylor et al , 2005Williams et al 2012). Zeki (1999) goes as far as to view a painter as 'a neuroscientist'-an experimentalist who, by trial and error, creates structure that matches the brain's mechanisms of structural visual analysis.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Structural Content in Paintings: Artists Overregularize Oriented Content of Paintings Relative to the Typical Natural Scene Bias

Schweinhart

Essock

2013

Perception

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Natural scenes tend to be biased in both scale (1/f) and orientation (H > V >> O; horizontal > vertical >> oblique), and the human visual system has similar biases that serve to partially 'undo' (ie whiten) the resultant representation. The present approach to investigating this relationship considers content in works of art-scenes produced for processing by the human visual system. We analyzed the content of images by a method that minimizes errors inherent in some prior analysis methods. In the first experiment museum paintings were considered by comparing the amplitude spectrum of landscape paintings, natural scene photos, portrait paintings, and photos of faces. In the second experiment we obtained photos of paintings at the time they were produced by local artists and compared structural content in matched photos which contained the same scenes that the artists had painted. Results show that artists produce paintings with both the 1/f bias of scale and the horizontal-effect bias of orientation (H > V >> O). More importantly, results from both experiments show that artists overregularize the structure in their works: they impose the natural-scene horizontal effect at all structural scales and in all types of subject matter even though, in the real world, the pattern of anisotropy differs considerably across spatial scale and between faces and natural scenes. It appears that artists unconsciously overregularize the oriented structure in their works to make it conform more uniformly to the 'expected' canonical ideal.

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