title: Ambiguities and conventions in the perception of visual art.
abstract: Vision perception is ambiguous and visual arts play with these ambiguities. While perceptual ambiguities are resolved with prior constraints, artistic ambiguities are resolved by conventions. Is there a relationship between priors and conventions? This review surveys recent work related to these ambiguities in composition, spatial scale, illumination and color, three-dimensional layout, shape, and movement. While most conventions seem to have their roots in perceptual constraints, those conventions that differ from priors may help us appreciate how visual arts differ from everyday perception.
authors.affiliation: CNRS & Université Paris Descartes, Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception (UMR 8158), 45 rue des Saints-Pères, 75006 Paris, France. pascal.mamassian@univ-paris5.fr
authors.forename: Pascal
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Mamassian
mesh_terms: D001154:Art; D003118:Color Perception; D005556:Form Perception; D006801:Humans; D008029:Lighting; D009039:Motion Perception; D010151:Paintings; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D014796:Visual Perception