Do artists see their retinas?

Frontiers in Human Neuroscience

Patrick eCavanagh¹  Florian ePerdreau¹ 

[1] Universté Paris-Descartes;

关键词: Art;    Vision;    visual search;    scene perception;    visual constancy;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fnhum.2011.00171

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Our perception starts with the image that falls on our retina and in this retinal image, distant objects are small and shadowed surfaces are dark. But this is not what we see. Visual constancies correct for distance so that a person approaching us does not appear to become a larger person, a white sheet held in a shadow still appears white, and so forth. Interestingly, an artist, when rendering a scene realistically, must undo all these corrections and return to the image on their retina, making, for example, distant objects appropriately small. Have artists acquired specialized adaptations of vision to accomplish this task? We examined the perceptual abilities of artists compared to non-artists by first asking them to adjust either the size or the brightness of a target to match it to a standard that was presented either on a perspective grid or within a cast shadow. We instructed them to ignore the context, judging size, for example, by imagining the separation between their fingers if they were to pick up the test object from the display screen. Then to test the speed with which artists might access early visual representations, subjects searched for an L-shape in contact with a circle; the target was an L-shape, but because of visual completion, it appeared to be a square occluded behind a circle, camouflaging the L-shape. Surprisingly, artists were as affected by context as non-artists in all three tests. Moreover, artists took, on average, significantly more time to make their judgments, implying that they were doing their best to demonstrate the special skills that we, and they, believed they had acquired. Our data therefore support the proposal from Gombrich that artists do not have special perceptual expertise to undo the effects of constancies. Instead, once the context is present in their drawing, they need only compare the drawing to the scene to match the effect of constancies in both.

【 授权许可】

Unknown