Picasso in the mind’s eye of the beholder: Three-dimensional filling-in of a...

 

 

Sent to you by Frouke via Google Reader:

 

 

Picasso in the mind’s eye of the beholder: Three-dimensional filling-in of ambiguous line drawings

via ScienceDirect Publication: Cognition on 8/30/12

Publication year: 2012
Source:Cognition
Jan Koenderink, Andrea van Doorn, Johan Wagemans
Cartoon-style line drawings contain very condensed information, after all most of the page stays blank. Yet, they constrain the contents of immediate visual awareness to an extraordinary extent. This is true even for drawings that are – though nominally "representational" – not even in central projection. Moreover, the strokes used in a drawing may stand for a bewildering variety of entities in the world. We studied Picasso drawings from the 1940s in which the artist famously combined multiple viewpoints. We find that the pictorial reliefs obtained from various observers agree to a large extent, and that the differences are of a very specific nature, typically involving variations in the mutual spatial attitudes of rigid body parts in figure studies. Although the purely planar layout of the drawings accounts for much of visual awareness, observers also use the sparse depth cues provided by the artist to evoke volumetric impressions. Observers also freely insert "template knowledge" about the structure of familiar generic objects.

Highlights

► Cartoon-style line drawings constrain the contents of immediate visual awareness. ► Observers perceive body parts of depicted human figures in idiosyncratic attitudes. ► Observers use sparse depth cues used by the artist to evoke volumetric impressions. ► Observers freely insert "template knowledge" about generic object structure.

 

 

Things you can do from here:

• Subscribe to ScienceDirect Publication: Cognition using Google Reader
• Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites