Color for the perceptual organization of the pictorial plane: Victor Vasarely's legacy to Gestalt psychology

Birgitta Dresp-Langley,Adam Reeves

doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2020.e04375

Birgitta Dresp-Langley, Adam Reeves

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2020.e04375

Copy DOI

Abstract

Victor Vasarely's (1906–1997) important legacy to the study of human perception is brought to the forefront and discussed. A large part of his impressive work conveys the appearance of striking three-dimensional shapes and structures in a large-scale pictorial plane. Current perception science explains such effects by invoking brain mechanisms for the processing of monocular (2D) depth cues. Here in this study, we illustrate and explain local effects of 2D color and contrast cues on the perceptual organization in terms of figure-ground assignments, i.e. which local surfaces are likely to be seen as “nearer” or “bigger” in the image plane. Paired configurations are embedded in a larger, structurally ambivalent pictorial context inspired by some of Vasarely's creations. The figure-ground effects these configurations produce reveal a significant correlation between perceptual solutions for “nearer” and “bigger” when other geometric depth cues are missing. In consistency with previous findings on similar, albeit simpler visual displays, a specific color may compete with luminance contrast to resolve the planar ambiguity of a complex pattern context at a critical point in the hierarchical resolution of figure-ground uncertainty. The potential role of color temperature in this process is brought forward here. Vasarely intuitively understood and successfully exploited the subtle context effects accounted for in this paper, well before empirical investigation had set out to study and explain them in terms of information processing by the visual brain.

Highlights

Victor Vasarely's (1906–1997) major work was essentially inspired by Gestalt Theory (Metzger, 1930; Rubin, 1921; Wertheimer, 1923)
It was shown that a fully saturated red may override, or win against, a green with the same luminance contrast, or a grey with a stronger luminance contrast within a restricted range of background grey levels (Guibal and Dresp, 2004). These findings suggest that, when no other 2D cues to depth are given in the plane, color, in the same way as luminance contrast (O'Shea, 1994), acquires the status of a self-sufficient monocular depth cue
Vasarely's oeuvre (1906–1997) set the standard for contemporary Op Art and graphical design, and is a source of inspiration for current virtual reality applications aimed at conveying realistic three-dimensional qualities through non-dimensonal representation projection of colour and form in affine space

Summary

Introduction

Victor Vasarely's (1906–1997) major work was essentially inspired by Gestalt Theory (Metzger, 1930; Rubin, 1921; Wertheimer, 1923) It exploits axonometric squares or cubes with more or less curvilinear contours, to convey the appearance of a three-dimensional structure to the pictorial plane. Perception science has only recently begun to understand the brain mechanisms driving this perceptual organization of planar image data on the basis of monocular cues to 3D that were already described by Leonardo da Vinci (da Vinci, 1651), and further discussed and illustrated centuries later by the Italian Gestalt Theorist Gaetano Kanizsa (e.g. Kanizsa, 1979) Such 2D cues enable both grouping and/or segregation of specific parts of the image plane on the basis of local differences in size, luminance contrast, and/or color and thereby confer order to a multitude of simultaneously incoming visual signals (von der Heydt, 2015). Such order expresses itself in statistically significant brain representations of structural regularity with psychophysically measurable perceptual correlates (Dresp-Langley et al, 2017)

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion