An Interactive Test of Color and Contour Perception by Artists and Non-Artists

The author explores Richard Latto’s proposition that art communicates effectively because artists manipulate basic features of form that the human perceptual system has evolved to detect. She offers an empirical test of the correlated proposition—that viewers of art use these same features to assess art. The author presents the results of an experiment in which both artists and non-artists were asked to discern and draw shapes in patterns defined by iterating dots. She finds that both groups used color in the case of positive shape and form edge in the case of negative space, thereby confirming that both makers and viewers of art focus on the same kinds of features to recognize and assess form.