In the Eye of the Beholder: The Perception of Indeterminate Art

Introduction

How do we interpret an object, a scene, or a painting? Perception research and art illuminate from different views how the vast amount of information in our visually perceived environment is processed by the viewer to form a coherent and consistent interpretation of the world. Using paintings by the artist Robert Pepperell, this paper outlines scientific research through which we attempt to connect these different world views. Pepperell's paintings may at first glance appear as baroque frescoes, expressionist still-lifes, or cubist collages. Taking a closer look, however, these concrete interpretations vanish and we are left with indeterminate images [1]. Using psychophysical experiments and eye tracking measures, in this work we sought to illuminate the visual processing of information in Pepperell's paintings. More specifically, we investigated how the pattern of eye fixations—the loci of interest—change as a function of the task (e.g. 'What is depicted in this scene?' vs. 'Does this image contain people?') and of the image content. The interpretation of the experimental results in the context of perceptual research offers insights into the perception of indeterminate art. At the same time, the results may contribute to the development of the artist’s project, as they provide some measurable validation of his intentions.

Eye Tracking and Behavioral Experiments

As is known from the early experiments by Yarbus [2], eye fixations are critically dependent on the task, i.e. how one looks at an image differs depending on what is being looked for. In our experiment, we were interested to investigate the difference between local and global processing of Pepperell's paintings. To do this we asked participants to view a set of paintings and to solve two different visual tasks while we recorded their eye activity. In order to test local information processing strategies we asked whether a person could be found in the painting (‘person task’), whereas global information processing was tested by asking subjects to categorize the painting into one of seven pre-defined categories (‘categorization task’).

Methods

A total of 30 indeterminate drawings and paintings were shown to 20 participants. These 30 works of art were split into two sets of 15 paintings that were used in each task. The first 10 participants saw the first set for the person task and the second set for the categorization task, whereas for the remaining 10 participants we changed the sets for each task in order to counterbalance for possible order effects. Afterwards, a behavioral task was set in which a question relating to each of the two tasks was shown on the screen and participants had to answer by selecting the appropriate item from a list. For the person task, the question was 'Was there a person in this image?' and for the categorization task the question was 'To which of the following categories does this image belong?' Here the choice consisted of seven categories: 'Biblical scenes', 'Landscapes with person', 'Landscape without a person', 'Portrait', 'Still-life', 'Battle scene', and 'None of the above', these categories having been determined in prior pilot experiments. Response times for answering these questions were also measured.

Overall Results

In general, the behavioral data shows that participants were able to consistently categorise some images, whereas other images could not be classified consistently at all. The results showed that overall the paintings, indeed, correspond closely to Pepperell's artistic intention of providing indeterminacy. In addition, participants used the 'none-of-the-above' category for 26% of all responses, again showing that some paintings defy easy categorization. Taken together, these results provide a rough yet consistent validation of Pepperell's indeterminate paintings in terms of their category membership.

The eye tracking data shows a difference in activity between the two tasks —person spotting and scene categorization. The top pair of images in Fig. 1 shows a much more centered distribution of fixations in subjects undertaking the person-spotting task, whereas the bottom pair in Fig. 1 shows a broader, more localized spread in subjects doing the categorization task [3]. The processed images on the right, showing the...