experiencing art is subjective; scientific analysis is objective
1. How can science inform art?
2. Summarize the interplay between reality and illusion from the perspective of some major approaches to art since the Renaissance.
3. What is the relationship among face perception, spatial frequency analysis, and the Mona Lisa?
4. Define neuroesthetics, and list Ramachandran’s 10 universal laws of art.
5. How is the “golden ratio” related to esthetic experience?
6. How can art inform science?
C. P. Snow (1959):
- British scientist and novelist wrote an article, gave an influential lecture, and published a book titled The Two Cultures
- there is a division between the two cultures of the ________ and the __________
- argued that this separation has impoverished both sides, and has impeded efforts to relieve suffering around the world
- promoted cooperation and the building of bridges between the two cultures
- more recently, others have proposed that a “Third Culture” of scientists could communicate directly with the public
Can science tell us anything about art?
No:
experiencing art is subjective; scientific analysis is objective
appreciating art involves norms; science deals in facts
art is a concept; understanding it depends on conceptual study, not empirical investigation
Yes:
art can be objectively analyzed, as a ________
norms should be related to human cognitive and perceptual abilities
some concepts may have precise definitions, and may be applied like _____
________:
To what extent is the aesthetic response learned?
If you were never exposed to art as you grew up, would you still respond to it?
Do you learn from art?
_________:
What kind of understanding does art give?
How important is thinking, as contrasted with emotion, in understanding art?
Do you need to think about a work of art to really appreciate it?
________:
In what kind of “language” does art speak?
Is art the language of emotion?
Is it a universal language?
_________ and __________:
How does our sensory apparatus affect our perception of works of art?
(e.g., Can the visually impaired appreciate sculpture?)
How do artists use knowledge of perception in their work?
(e.g., How do painters use perception and visual illusions to achieve “realism”?)
____________:
What are the physiological correlates of the aesthetic experience?
(e.g., How does art activate the sympathetic nervous system?)
Can neuroscience contribute anything to understanding art or creativity?
Questions:
Doesn’t all art use ________?
If the art draws attention to this, is it inferior art?
Medieval period (5th-15th centuries):
• artwork often lacked depth cues, making it seem flat and unrealistic
e.g., The Arrest of Christ (unknown, c.1290)
___________ (14th-16th centuries):
• saw increased use of pictorial depth cues in paintings, which created greater realism
e.g., Predica di San Marco ad Alessandria d’Egitto (St. Mark Preaching in Alexandria, Egypt) (Gentile and Giovanni Bellini, c.1504-1507)
__________ (19th century):
• reacted against verisimilitude of photographs
• in contrast, interpreted viewer’s perception of reality--not just “what the eye saw”
e.g., Impression, Sunrise (Claude Monet, 1872)
• Livingstone (2002):
- Impression, Sunrise depicts glowing red sun appearing though dense morning fog
- in achromatic (black & white) version, the sun’s luminosity is equal to the background
- thus, to the _____ system, the sun is invisible
- the “visual disagreement” between the Where and What systems gives the sun its vibrating, jumpy intensity
- when sun is altered to a more “naturalistic” lighter shade, it loses its vibrancy
____-__________ (late 19th century):
• often did not mix paints (subtractive colour mixing), but used complementary colours to achieve the same effect (additive colour mixing)
• Georges Seurat (1859-1891):
- took a more scientific approach (critics called him the “little chemist”)
- studied colour theory and developed Pointillism: painting comprised of tiny dots of pure, intense colours
e.g., Un dimanche après-midi à l’Ile de la Grande Jatte (Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte) (Seurat, 1886); La Parade (Seurat, 1889) (detail)
• others painted only the essential elements of form
• Paul Cézanne (1839-1906):
- interested in simplifying natural forms to their geometric essentials
e.g., Le Mont Sainte-Victoire (Cézanne, 1902-1904)
- later paintings had increasingly “_____” canvas (called nonfinito)
- wanted to know how much the brain would fill in the empty spaces
e.g., Montagne Sainte Victoire (Cézanne, 1904-1905)
______ (20th century):
• liberated form by reassembling reality, instead of portraying it
• reduced objects to combinations of geometric forms (feature analysis?) which are perceptually reassembled (by Gestalt principles of organization?)
e.g., Violin and Grapes (Pablo Picasso, 1912) applies similarity, proximity, and closure
e.g., Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (Marcel Duchamp, 1912) uses continuity (and common fate?)
De Stijl (Dutch for “___ _____”, also known as Neoplasticism; 20th century):
• advocated for pure abstraction, to reduce things to their essentials
• ignored natural form and colour
• used vertical and horizontal lines, and only black & white and primary colours
• Piet Mondrian (1872-1944):
e.g., Composition with Yellow, Blue and Red (Mondrian, 1937-1942)
__________ (“beyond reality”; early 20th century):
• emphasized how dreamlike states, symbols, and the workings of the unconscious mind affect conscious reality
• influenced by Freud’s writings on the unconscious
e.g., La Trahison des Images (The Treachery of Images) (René Magritte, 1928-1929)
e.g., The Persistence of Memory (Salvador Dalí, 1931)
e.g., Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire (Dalí, 1940)
• Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972):
- wanted people to think about the nature of reality and the process of visual perception
- was directly affected by _______ psychology, citing specific journal articles that inspired his work
e.g., Ascending and Descending (M.C. Escher, 1960) based on an article in the British Journal of Psychology (Penrose & Penrose, 1958)
e.g., Waterfall (Escher, 1961) uses Penrose (impossible) triangles
e.g., Belvedere (Escher, 1958) inspired by Necker cube
• René François Ghislain Magritte (1898-1967):
- challenged people to think about the conventions of painting
- blurred the line between the real world and the illusory world created by the artist; asks the question, “What is reality?”
- many works depict paintings on a easel, with the “real” scene continuing at the edges
e.g., The Human Condition (Magritte, 1935)
• surrealism frequently seen in ____________ images
___ ___ (1950s):
• drew influence from popular culture, advertising, comic books
• experimented with variations in colours
e.g., Marilyn Monroe (Andy Warhol, 1962)
• exaggerated print techniques, using widely spaced dots to create different colours, like ___________
e.g., Whaam! (Roy Lichtenstein, 1963)
__ ___ (“optical art,” also known as perceptual abstraction; 1960s):
• is abstract, constructed of lines or geometric patterns that affect the figure-ground relationship, causing tension
• results in visual illusions giving the impression of movement (kinetic art), vibration, patterns, or depth and warping
e.g., Blaze 1 (Bridget Riley, 1962)
e.g., Enigma (Isia Léviant, 1981)
• motion perception caused by microsaccades: minute involuntary eye movements (Troncoso et al., 2008)
- these trigger neural signals of the higher-luminance (e.g., white) and lower-luminance (e.g., black) features
- higher-luminance neural signals travel faster than lower-luminance signals
- this discrepancy is interpreted as motion (peripheral drift illusion)
e.g., rotating snakes illusion (Kitaoka & Ashida, 2003)
• Victor Vasarely (1906-1997):
- called “the father of op art”
e.g., Tukoer-Ter-Ur (Vasarely, 1989) uses texture gradients and linear perspective to create illusion of depth
______ ______ (“trick the eye”; employed as early as classical antiquity, but popularized in Baroque period and revived in 19th century America):
• technique of creating highly realistic imagery that creates the illusion that an object is present
• objects represented as (or appear to be) actual size
e.g., Old Models (William M. Harnett, 1892)
e.g., L.C., Which is which? (Donald Clapper, 2002)
Perceptual art (or perceptualism; late 20th-early 21st century):
• viewer is an active participant in the creation of the experience (e.g., by literally changing their point of view)
• the viewing __________ is as important as the subject
e.g., Magic Eye® autostereograms require the observer to view it a particular way
e.g., anamorphic sidewalk chalk drawings; only work from one perspective: Make Poverty History (Julian Beever, 2005)
e.g., Illusion (Michael Murphy, 2022): 3-D sculpture that creates different 2-D images depending on the viewing angle
Schyns & Oliva (1999): Dr. Angry and Mr. Smile
- are visual processing and categorization ___________?
- that is, does categorization occur late, on an already perceived stimulus, or are they intertwined, with categorization cognitively penetrating early perception?
- participants asked to categorize faces (e.g., male vs. female, facial expression vs. no expression, or happy vs. angry vs. neutral)
- filtered spatial frequencies in neutral, angry, and happy faces:
• high-pass filtering (≥ 8 cpd): resulting image has sharp, fine lines (i.e., ____ spatial frequencies, HSFs)
• low-pass (≤ 2 cpd): contains blurred, large-scale luminance variations (i.e., ___ spatial frequencies, LSFs)
- combined faces to create hybrids:
(a) HSF neutral female/LSF happy male face
(b) HSF angry male/LSF neutral female face
- when viewed close-up, HSFs ____ LSFs:
(a) appears neutral, (b) appears angry
- at a distance, LSFs are more visible:
(a) appears happy, (b) appears neutral
- information extracted in parallel by neural channels with sensitivity to different spatial frequencies
- channels are not independent, but ________ (sharp edges mask blurred gross features)
- despite masking by HSFs, participants were able to process faces at the appropriate level of detail to categorize them
e.g., given a combination HSF neutral/LSF happy face, is the expression happy or angry?
- suggests categorization is closely bound to low-level visual processes
- recently, created other “______ images”
- other examples include All is Vanity (Charles Allan Gilbert, 1892), Ballerina in a Death’s Head (Dalí, 1939), Cher’s Heart of Stone (Ocampo, 1989), Def Leppard’s Retro Active (Israelson & Syme, 1993), Aerosmith’s Devil’s Got A New Disguise - The Very Best Of Aerosmith (2006)
Harmon & Julesz (1973):
- the Abraham Lincoln effect: “block portrait” is difficult to identify close-up, but easily identifiable from a distance
e.g., Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea which at Twenty Meters becomes a Portrait of Abraham Lincoln (Homage to Rothko), Salvador Dalí (1976)
- with greater distance, the amount of masking produced by the high spatial frequency “blocks” is reduced, allowing low spatial frequency information to dominate
Mona Lisa (Leonardo da Vinci, c.1503-1507)
- smile of model has been described as ambiguous, enigmatic, elusive, mocking, sad, innocent, and inviting
- _____ (1910) interpreted smile as representation of da Vinci’s erotic attraction to his mother
Livingstone (2000):
- Mona Lisa’s smile is more apparent in peripheral vision, rather than ______ vision
- fovea has smaller receptive fields 
high spatial frequency; periphery low spatial frequency
- filtered image with Gaussian blur spatial frequency filters in Photoshop
- smile visible in low-pass image (left), but not in high-pass image (right)
- merging both (centre image) restores the smile
- da Vinci used shadows from her cheekbones (low frequency) to accentuate the corners of her mouth, making her smile more distinct when viewed peripherally
- thus, there is a change in ______ __________ from low to high spatial frequency
- may be due to blurring by sfumato (“vanished” or “smoky”) painting technique (which interferes with high spatial frequencies)
Further support: Kontsevich & Tyler (2004):
- visual system affected by _____, from photon noise to random neural activation; this may affect face perception, including portraits
- introduced random visual noise to images of the Mona Lisa
- observers rated her facial expression on a 4-point scale from sad to happy
- manipulations had a profound effect on observers’ ratings; most expressions were meaningful
- smiling “__ ___ ____” depended on smiling mouth
- supports the position that the smile in Mona Lisa is ambiguous
- (also affected photos of Kontsevich’s girlfriend, who refused to allow her picture to be published)
______________ (Semir Zeki, 1998, 1999, 2001):
• the explanation and understanding of the esthetics of art from the perspective of neuroscience
• attempts to discover universals in art and esthetics using neuroscience
• visual art reveals the brain’s perceptual capabilities:
1. law of _________: despite variations in visual stimuli, we can determine essential properties of objects
e.g., cubism attempted to eliminate point of view, distance, and lighting--but we can still identify what is being depicted
e.g., Woman Playing the Mandolin (Picasso, 1909)
2. law of ___________: a specific instance or representation can be generalized, due to limitations of memory
e.g., some cells process objects in a viewpoint-invariant manner
Solso (2000):
- recruited well-known portrait painter Humphrey Ocean, and a graduate student with no art training; both right-handed
- viewed and sketched 6 faces and 6 geometric figures while in fMRI
- activity resulting from presenting geometric figures was subtracted from the faces to control for motor activity, activity in V1, etc.
- results:
• increase in blood flow to face-processing regions in right posterior parietal--but less activity for artist compared to novice (artist more “_________”?)
• artist had greater right middle frontal activation: handles complex association and manipulation of visual forms (artist “______” more than he “sees”?)
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran (1999, 2003, 2004, 2006): 10 universal laws of art
(or, “the neurological basis of artistic universals”)
“Art...[is] not about representing reality, it’s about hyperbole, exaggeration, and idealization.”
1. ____ _____ ______
• first discovered in pigeons (Hanson, 1959)
Training phase:
- animal reinforced for responding to a stimulus SD (e.g., rectangle)
- no reinforcement given for stimulus SΔ (e.g., square)
Testing phase:
- greatest response occurs to stimulus that is more extreme than the training set (e.g., ____ ______ rectangle)
• exaggerated depictions in art are preferred (e.g., hyperattractive faces?)
e.g., statue of Parvati; ___________
• Herring gull chicks peck more at a stick with three red stripes than one that more closely resembled their mother’s beak (Tinbergen, 1957)
2. __________ ________ and binding
• Gestalt principles of organization
• “discovering” groupings are reinforcing; may be useful in the future (e.g., defeating camouflage)
3. ________
• visual cells (e.g., retina, LGN, etc.) prefer contrasting stimuli, and are thus pleasing to look at
e.g., The Golden Fish (Paul Klee, 1925)
4. _________
• a single visual modality (e.g., colour, depth, luminance) is selected and amplified to produce a stronger esthetic experience; serves to focus attention
e.g., Icarus (Jazz) (Henri Matisse, 1947)
• line drawings are often more evocative than a full colour photograph
e.g. drawings by 6-year-old autistic child vs. da Vinci vs. 8-year-old neurotypical child
- the minds of those with autism tend to allocate attention to one thing (like form) in exclusion of others (like, say, __________ processing)
5. perceptual _______ _______
• attempting to construct an representation from an incomplete stimulus is reinforcing; being presented with the whole figure is not
e.g., La Reproduction Interdite (Not to be Reproduced) (Magritte, 1937)
6. ________
• visual processing prefers stimuli that are symmetrical; due to ease of processing?
• symmetrical faces (and bodies) are preferred
e.g., High and Low (M.C. Escher, 1947)
7. abhorrence of ___________/generic viewpoint
• Bayesian models have been applied to low- and high-level vision (probabilistic network approach to segmentation): the visual system selects the most likely interpretation
• we prefer generic viewpoints
e.g., image (A) implies occlusion (multiple viewpoints possible); but (B) reveals that it could only be produced from one unique (non-generic) vantage point
• we abhor coincidence
e.g., image (A) is too unlikely and coincidental; image (B) is more natural
8. (visual) ________
• metaphors and symbols give artworks multiple layers of meaning beyond the literal
• metaphors may reduce cognitive complexity by relating a novel experience to a familiar one
• (or, more cognitive work may be required, which can be reinforcing?)
e.g., many arms of Shiva as Nataraja symbolize multiple divine attributes of God; the ring of fire that Nataraja dances in is a metaphor for the dance of the cosmos and the cyclical nature of creation and destruction (bronze, Chola dynasty, 12th century)
e.g., Picasso portrayed the bombing of Guernica with imagery of a bull, horse, and lightbulb: Guernica, Picasso (1937)
9. _______ and harmony
• successful art makes use of the entire representational space; information is spread across the entire canvas
• Fechner (1865) first attempted to explain beauty in terms of the golden ratio
• the “golden ratio” is the sum of two quantities:larger quantity::larger:smaller
i.e., (a + b):a::a:b, (a/b = (a + b)/a), or 1.6180339887:1
• also known as the golden section, golden mean, or golden number; or the “divine proportion”
• also seen in the Fibonacci (1202) series: every number after the first two is the sum of the two preceding ones (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, etc.)
- dividing each number by the one before it approximates golden ratio
e.g., found in nature in phyllotaxis (arrangement of leaves on a stem)
• applied explicitly in art and architecture since the Renaissance
e.g., The Sacrament of the Last Supper (Dalí, 1955)
e.g., the Parthenon
e.g., like the “rule of thirds” in photography
• applied to analyze ______ beauty (Gottlieb & Marquardt, 2002):
- used golden ratio to create multiple overlapping golden triangles, pentagons, decagons, etc. to create “golden decagon matrix”
- matrix used to create “______ ____” which is applied to facial features
- close match of mask to human face presumed to be indicative of facial beauty--even of the “perfect face”
- is _____________; no peer-reviewed publications
• Di Dio et al. (2007):
- Is there an objective biological basis for the experience of beauty in art?
- Or is aesthetic experience entirely subjective?
- Does the Golden Ratio contribute to judgments of aesthetic beauty?
- method: observers naïve to art criticism placed in fMRI while viewing images of Classical and Renaissance sculptures
- stimuli: _________ (original) or modified images
- canonical images all had golden ratio among body parts
e.g., Doryphoros (Polykleitos, c.450-440 BCE)
- viewing conditions:
• observation (view images “as if they were in a museum”; non-evaluative)
• aesthetic judgment
- analyses:
1) compared brain responses to canonical and modified sculptures
2) compared brain responses to beautiful and ugly sculptures (based on observer’s aesthetic judgment)
- findings: canonical images were strongly preferred over modified images
1) canonical sculptures activated right insula (mediates emotions; connects to/from amygdala): evidence for _________ beauty (“I can see why people like that.”)
2) beautiful images activated right amygdala (responds to learned emotional information): evidence for __________ beauty (“I like that.”)
- conclusion: both of these non-mutually exclusive processes contribute to appreciation of artwork
• Green (1995): “All that glitters: A review of psychological research on the aesthetics of the golden section”
- evidence showing that the golden ratio underlies aesthetic properties is _________
10. __________, rhythm and orderliness
• beauty is inseparable from the appearance of order; pictures filled with patterns, like subtle colour repetitions or formal rhythms, appear more elegant and composed
e.g., Sun and Moon (M.C. Escher, 1948)
Pros & Cons:
new way to think about esthetics and/or brain functioning
some _______ from neuroscience/psychology
vague on a lot of the “_____-” part of neuroesthetics
predictive of esthetics, or merely post hoc?
are these laws necessary and sufficient for ________ art?
(Cavanagh, 2005)
- visual art reveals that there is an “___________ _______” in our minds that differs from the rules that apply to the real world
- paintings can diverge from reality, but often these deviations are not noticed--they do not interfere with the observer’s understanding of the scene
- Patrick Cavanagh argues that this is what makes discovering these deviations a form of neuroscience: artists reveal that our brains use a simpler, reduced physics to understand the world
- the goal is not to expose the “slip-ups” of artists, but to understand how the brain processes visual information
- the _____-___: simplified internal physics vs. rapid and efficient perception of the real world
Cast shadows (Casati & Cavanagh, 2019):
- ____________ direction of lighting is not readily noticed
e.g., detail from The Birth of the Virgin (Fra Carnevale, 1467)
- artists may treat shadows like paint, overlapping them as if they were ______
e.g., detail from The Assumption of the Virgin with Saints Michael and Benedict (Luca Signorelli, c.1480)
- shadows must be ______ to create 3-D structure
e.g., Autoritratto a macchia from L’Arte Decorativa Moderna (“Modern Decorative Art”) (Giorgio Kienerk, 1903)
Boundaries:
- lines do not divide objects from their backgrounds in the real world
- however, much of art, including some of the earliest recorded art, uses line drawings:
e.g., cave painting at Lascaux, France (c.15,000 BCE)
- artists don’t simply trace brightness discontinuities, but outline the ________ that characterize shape
e.g., The Lean Horse and the Fat Horse (Jen Jen-fa, c.1300)
Transparency:
- artists simulate transparency by crossing the contours of the transparent object with the contours of the background
- gross deviations from the optics of __________ are rarely noticed by the viewer; the brain must not compute those object properties
e.g., Salvator Mundi (Leonardo da Vinci, c.1500): orb does not distort/invert light
e.g., Implement Blue (Margaret Preston, 1927): lemon in water is not distorted
- X-junctions are critical for the successful depiction of transparency
e.g., from Gestalt psychologist Fabio Metelli (1974)
Completion:
- our brains are able to fill in gaps and construct meaningful images from fragments
e.g., The Yellow Dancers (Gino Severini, c.1911-1912)
Three-dimensionality:
- we can accurately interpret images that are less than 3-D; this indicates that we do not experience the visual world as truly 3-D (if we did, paintings would not exist; all art would be _________)
- as long as an image is flat, it does not seem distorted; if it’s folded, our perception is altered when it’s tilted
e.g., folded photos
- this tolerance of flat representations is found in all cultures, infants, and in other species
Reflections:
- art reveals that we have no visual knowledge of mirrors or reflection
- the Venus effect: paintings depict a person apparently looking at their own reflection, but the mirror shows the subject looking at the observer, which is __________ according to the laws of optics (Bertamini et al., 2003)
- size misperception: your reflection in a mirror is actually half your physical size; also, your distance from the mirror does not change the size of your body’s reflection on its surface
e.g., Venus at her Mirror (the Rokeby Venus) (Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velázquez, 1647-1651)
Perhaps by continuing to explore the intersection of art and neuroscience--and seeing how one can inform the other--the gap between art and science may be _______.