REVEALING HIGH DETECTABILITY OF OBJECTS

In cubist paintings by Picasso, Braque and Gris it is possible to detect everyday objects like guitars, bottles or jugs, although they are often difficult to decipher. In this art-science collaborative study the authors found that participants without expertise in cubism appreciated cubist artworks more if they were able to detect concealed objects in them. The finding of this strong correlation between detectability and preference offers wide implications for art history and human cognition as it points to a mechanism that allows us to derive pleasure from searching for and finding meaningful patterns. Introduction The human visual system continually constructs order out of highly ambiguous and instable stimuli we receive from the world. Artworks often exploit, reveal, and play with the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms involved by presenting viewers with prediction-errors [1], contradictions [2], indeterminacy [3,4], or ambiguity [3, 5] inducing elaboration of various interpretations at the same time. Cubist paintings are especially open to interpretation, as they are full of everyday objects that are concealed because they are depicted in a fragmented way that makes immediate recognition very difficult. In this paper we show that viewers’ appreciation of cubist paintings is closely linked to the viewers’ ability to identify an object, or a Gestalt, from partial clues. Many art theorists and perception researchers have proposed such a relation between appreciation and emerging order from disorder, ambiguity, or indeterminacy. The philosopher of art George Dickie stresses the recognition of “uniformity in variety” or “simplicity in complexity” [6], while according to the psychologists Hekkert and Leder: “we like to look at patterns that allow us to see relationships or create order” [7]. Reber et al. claim that increased fluency in processing a complex topic enhances appreciation [8]. Meanwhile, Van de Cruys and Wagemans suggest that artworks often violate viewers’ perceptual predictions, and that they are then able to derive aesthetic pleasure from reducing the cognitive uncertainty induced by those violations [1]. The neurologists Ramachandran and Hirstein argue that perceptual grouping processes in general are linked with the neural structures known as the ‘reward system’ [9]. But despite the frequent claims that detecting Gestalt, or recognizable form, in challenging visual stimuli is inherently pleasing, to date this has not been demonstrated empirically. In this study we chose as stimuli cubist artworks by Picasso, Braque and Gris because they offer a high degree of visual indeterminacy and ambiguity yet at the same time are full of recognizable depicted objects [3, 4]. Thus, they provide a perfect opportunity to test whether the viewers’ ability to detect these objects is linked to their appreciation of the paintings. Participants Twenty participants (Mage= 23.8 yrs; range: 19-36 yrs; 13 females) volunteered in the study. They had normal or corrected-to-normal vision ensured by a Standard Snellen’s eye chart test and by a short version of the Ishihara color vision test. They had no expertise in cubist art. Apparatus and Stimuli Stimuli consisted of photographs of 120 cubist artworks by Pablo Picasso (47), Georges Braque (33), and Juan Gris (40), all of them being adapted to 450 pixels width and 600 pixels height (if the proportion was not 4.5:6 we cropped the pictures accordingly). The participants sat at an approximate distance of 55 cm in front of a LG W2220P screen with 22inch screen size at a resolution of 1680 × 1050 pixels yielding a visual angle of about 16.6° x 21.6° for the stimuli. Procedure and Results The study was structured in two blocks, each showing the stimuli in a randomized order. During the first block, subjects had to rate the pictures on liking. During the second block, participants rated how well they could detect objects within the artwork. All ratings were chosen from a 7-point-Likert-scale from 1 (‘not at all’) to 7 (‘very’). For both variables we aggregated data across participants, revealing a strong relationship between the detectability of objects within cubist artworks and liking indicated by a Pearson correlation of R= . 781, p<. 0001 (see Fig. 1). Discussion The results show that Gestalt formation is closely linked to appreciation; viewers much preferred paintings in which they were able to decipher concealed objects. This finding is in line with previous proposals about the link between detecting order and appreciation [7], reward by Fig. 1. Data points represent detectability of objects and liking per stimulus revealing that the better the participants could detect objects within an artwork, the more they liked it. The amount of explained variance is 60.9% indicated by R. The equation gives the relationship of X (Detectability) and Y (Liking). 488 Leonardo, Vol. 46, no. 5, pp. 488–489, 2013 doi:10.1162/Leon_a_00649 © 2013 isast Downloaded from http://direct.mit. edu/leon/article-pdf/46/5/488/1575705/leon_a_00649. pdf by guest on 10 May 2021