Abstract
We see the world not only in terms of lower-level features such as orientation and motion, but also in terms of properties which are typically associated with language and higher-level thought. For example, a landscape’s colors and shapes might look wistful, lugubrious, or aesthetically pleasing. Yet in most art perception studies, it is unclear whether observers’ responses reflect what they visually perceive or simply what they think images should represent. To clarify this, my lab has developed two tools to isolate the role of visual processing in art experience. First, we demonstrate that it is possible to record one participant’s viewing pattern while they view an art photograph through a small aperture, and to ‘transplant’ their viewing pattern to a second participant to cause them to like the image similarly to the first participant. This method isolates the contributions of visual attention to aesthetic judgments. Second, I introduce a new ‘Blindfold Test’, which identifies experiments in art perception whose results may not reflect visual perception at all, and which may instead reflect participants’ post-perceptual reasoning about how they should respond to images. I show that several published experiments yield identical results even when replacing the original visual stimuli with (mere) verbal descriptions. For these experiments, I conclude that higher-level reasoning is sufficient (and that visual processing may not be necessary) to observe their results. In summary, I discuss experimental strategies which can be used to study the perception of art images while controlling for language and higher-level interpretation.
Presenters
Ben Van BurenAssistant Professor, Department of Psychology, The New School, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Empirical aesthetics, Art perception, Vision science
