In perception psychology, multistabile perception of ambiguous figures is often considered as a marginal curiosity. Nevertheless, this phenomenon is one of the most investigated psychological phenomena, because it has attracted perceptual scientists since the first description of ambiguity, given by Necker in 1832. Actually, ambiguous patterns are not freak phenomena. The objective of this paper is to show that the mathematical models of the perception of ambiguous patterns can be regarded as the basic models of artistic perception.
Ambiguous patterns are examples of two-state, bimodal systems in psychology.
Ambiguous patterns are two-state systems. The first parameter a quantitatively describes the change in bias in the drawing. The second parameter b describes how much the amount of detailes is presented in the ambiguous figure. Each pattern is described in this model as a vector in the space of quantitative parameters. There is a procedure for selecting non-correlated parameters, which enable to reduce an information volume.