Art
June 11, 2007
Category: Art • Color perception • Perception • Research
This is a guest post by Suzie Eckl, one of Greta's top student writers for Spring 2007
Forget color television.
Before we had color, we had black and white. Before we had movies, we had photographs. And before photographs we had...
Engravings?
Prior to August 19, 1839, the date Daguerre and Niepce revealed that they had created the world's first photograph, artists had all the control in reproducing the world as they saw it. Many artists chose not painting or sculpture but engraving. They carved their images into wood or burned them into metal.
In a fascinating analysis, Danielle Zavagno and Manfredo Massironi have uncovered some key differences between the techniques used by engravers and the photograph. It shouldn't be surprising that an engraving lacks certain qualities that a modern photograph would have.
Read on »
Posted by Aaron Couch at 9:54 AM • Comments (9)
March 15, 2007
Category: Art • Attention • Face perception • Perception • Research
These two pictures represent the eye motions of two viewers as they scan a work of art with the goal of remembering it later. One of them is a trained artist, and the other is a trained psychologist. Can you tell which is which?
How about for this picture?
Art teachers have noted that when beginning students attempt to draw accurate portraits, they tend to exaggerate the size of key features: eyes and mouths are too big relative to the size of the head. Trained artists learn to ignore these temptations and draw the world as it really appears. Even world-famous artists such as Leonardo da Vinci have had to resort to tricks such as looking at their subject through a divided pane of glass in order to render proportions accurately. As you can see from the two examples above, even when looking at a picture, artists look differently. So which is which? I'll let you know at the end of the post.
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Posted by Dave Munger at 11:25 AM • Comments (47)
October 25, 2006
Category: Art • Attention • Language • Memory • Research
Everyone knows the saying "a picture is worth a thousand words." Bound by that axiom, magazines, newspapers, and most of all, TV, bombard us with pictures every day. The latest hot internet properties aren't text-based sites like Google but picture-based sites like Flickr and YouTube. Psychological research backs this up: we do remember pictures more readily than we remember words.
The next question, of course, is "why?" Recent research by Paul W. Foos and Paula Goolkasian is beginning to shed light on the difference between memory for pictures and words. They had previously found that while short-term memory for simple line drawings was superior to memory for printed words, the advantage disappeared when the word was spoken. This suggests that perhaps the difference between pictures and words in memory isn't as different as we might think.
In a new study, they set out to explore these differences more systematically. Volunteer participants were asked to complete two tasks simultaneously: they had to answer a question about a visual problem while committing a word to memory. This distractor task was designed to make the memory task more difficult, so differences in results could more readily be observed. There were two types of distractors: easy, or difficult. Here are two sample tasks:
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Posted by Dave Munger at 3:57 PM • Comments (0)
July 31, 2006
Category: Art • Perception • Research
[originally posted on March 16, 2005]
I've taken only two pictures of the Mona Lisa, and both turned out about the same: they captured the frenzied attempts of dozens of tourists trying to take a picture of the most-recognized image in the world. Here's the one I took last summer:
I hadn't noticed it until now, but the motion of the painting in the background seems to mirror the chaotic struggle of the tourists with their cameras. I wonder if the Louvre's curators placed it there as a sort of an inside joke.
But this post isn't about museum curators, it's about one feature of the Mona Lisa that's supposed to mark Leonardo as a true genius. As many have observed, "her eyes follow you around the room, moving as if by magic." Of course, it's not magic that makes her do that, it's simply an artifact of the fact that she's gazing directly at the painter. You can see this same effect in a snapshot of my daughter Nora:
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Posted by Dave Munger at 10:01 AM • Comments (1)
March 27, 2006
Category: Art • Perception • Research • Social
Take a look at these two shapes. Which appears more "joyful"? Which appears fearful?
How about these shapes? Which is angrier? Which appears to be suffering more?
If you're like most people, the shapes that appear to be less stable (number 1 in the figures above) are also more fearful. Those that are rotated more from the vertical position (number 2 in the figures) are more suffering and less angry.
Assigning emotions to shapes is nothing new. In experiments as early as the 1940s, individuals have been found to consistently apply the same emotions to shapes in schematic cartoons: "angry" triangles and "loving" circles. But only one study had attempted to see if people consistently assigned emotions to static shapes based on the appearance of dynamic forces.
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Posted by Dave Munger at 3:29 PM • Comments (13) • TrackBacks (1)
February 14, 2005
Category: Art • Perception • Research
Today's reading is "Artists as Experts in Visual Cognition," by Aaron Kozbelt of the University of Chicago (Visual Cognition, 2001).
We need to incorporate many skills in order to make visual sense of the world. We must be able to discern objects even when we have incomplete visual information, pick out shapes from complex environments, and mentally rotate images to compare them with other images. All these phenomena have been measured by psychologists, and they have found that different individuals have varying degrees of skill at them.
What kind of people are best at these visual skills? Perhaps people who have had more practice with them, like artists. Kozbelt designed an experiment to answer this question. He sampled three populations of Carnegie-Mellon students: First-year art majors, fourth-year art majors, and first-year non-art majors. He then gave them several tests: vision tests that measured the tasks I describe above, and drawing tasks such as copying a photo, copying simple diagrams, or replicating a complicated drawing without lifting the pencil or making corrections.
Perhaps surprisingly, Kozbelt found that the first- and fourth-year art students were equally good at all the tasks, despite the expensive education the seniors had received. However, all the art students did better than non-artists in all the vision tasks, and they did better at all the drawing tasks except copying a photo (I'll avoid the easy one-liners about "modern art").
So apparently there is something to the idea of an "artist's eye": artists really are better at the visual tasks that all of us need to perform simply to get along in the world. Artists aren't simply more manually dextrous than the rest of us, they're actually more visually dextrous as well.
There are other examples of "experts" being better than novices at tasks related to their field. For example, Herbert Simon and William Chase found that Chess grandmasters can easily remember the positions of pieces on a chessboard after viewing it for just a few seconds. However, if the pieces are arranged randomly rather than in a position reflecting a real chess game, the experts are no better than novices. In these cases, experts have memorized a large set of possible cases, and can easily retrieve each one. However, Kozbelt argues that what artists are doing is different. Rather than a pattern, they have mastered a process.
Posted by Dave Munger at 2:02 PM • Comments (0)
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