Abstract
Three observers performed a task designed to quantify their “pictorial relief” in visual awareness for a photograph of a piece of sculpture. In separate sessions, they were instructed to assume one of two “mental viewpoints.” The main objective was to investigate whether human observers have such command. All three observers could redirect their “mental view direction” by up to 20°. These observers experience “paradoxical monocular” stereopsis, whereas a sizable fraction of the population does not. Moreover, they had some experience in assuming various “viewing modes.” Whereas one cannot generalize to the population at large, these findings at least prove that it is possible to direct the mental viewpoint actively. This is of importance to the visual arts. For instance, academic drawings require one to be simultaneously aware of a “viewing” (for the drawing) and an “illumination direction” (for the shading). Being able to mentally deploy various vantage points is a crucial step from the “visual field” to the “visual space.”
Highlights
In matters of vision research, pictures have the decisive advantage that they are undisputedly flat objects
Paradoxical monocular stereopsis is at least a phenomenological fact (Koenderink, van Doorn, & Wagemans, 2011; Schlosberg, 1941), science has no explanation for it
We suggested the term ‘‘mental movement’’ for gauge transformations, we were not certain whether observers could deploy them voluntarily, nor could we be certain whether observers have access to global representations of pictorial relief or only to mutually weakly connected coherent patches
Summary
In matters of vision research, pictures have the decisive advantage that they are undisputedly flat (two-dimensional [2D]) objects. The fact that such reports keep coming in steadily—are routinely used in the visual arts community—has led to technical jargon such as ‘‘inverse optics’’ (Poggio, Torre, & Koch, 1985) and ‘‘paradoxical monocular stereopsis’’ (Claparede, 1904; Schlosberg, 1941). An inverse optics algorithm is supposed to yield a 3D scene description for a picture as input. Paradoxical monocular stereopsis is at least a phenomenological fact (Koenderink, van Doorn, & Wagemans, 2011; Schlosberg, 1941), science (e.g., computer vision) has no explanation for it.
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