Abstract
Does human vision deploy a generic template for open landscapes that might fit the gist of current optical input? In an experiment, participants judged depth order in split-field images in which the two fuzzily delineated half-images were filled with different hues. For the majority of observers, we find a systematic dependence of depth order of these half-images on their hue and/or brightness difference. After minor cleaning of the data, we are left with two mutually well-separated clusters. Correlation with the statistical distribution of hue and brightness in generic “open landscape” photographs reveals that one cluster correlates with hue, the other with brightness. This suggests that human observers indeed at least partly rely on “generic landscape” templates in the psychogenesis of their visual awareness.
Highlights
In landscape renderings, one often spontaneously notices two generic properties—apart from the obvious fact that both depict landscapes: there is a spatial organization in terms of horizontal bands, these bands are varicolored in a certain order of hues.The austere banding was created by Photoshopping in the case of Andreas Gursky’s photograph (Figure 1 right)
5 Conclusions Our results clearly indicate that hue differences evoke impressions of depth-order in the majority of observers
It is unlikely to have to do with color, because informal observations reveal the same effect in monochrome photographs, or even line drawings
Summary
The austere banding was created by Photoshopping in the case of Andreas Gursky’s photograph (Figure 1 right). In Hans Thoma’s painting (Figure 1 left), the banding is a dominant aspect of the composition. This painting illustrates the canonical color scheme that one encounters in Western landscape painting, namely roughly a brown-foreground, a green-middle ground, and a bluebackground (Clark, 1949; Gurney, 2010). One usually encounters a brightness gradient approximately running from dark (below) to light (top). The omnipresence of this scheme in the arts suggests that it may be a template in the psychogenesis of visual awareness
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