Vera M. Hesslinger

#TheDress: The Role of Illumination Information and Individual Differences in the Psychophysics of Perceiving White-Blue Ambiguities.

In early 2015, a public debate about a perceptual phenomenon that impressively demonstrated the subjective nature of human perception was running round the globe: the debate about #TheDress, a poorly lit photograph of a lace dress that was perceived as white–gold by some, but as blue–black by others. In the present research (N = 48), we found that the perceptual difference between white–gold perceivers (n1 = 24, 12 women, Mage = 25.4 years) and blue–black perceivers (n2 = 24, 12 women, Mage = 24.3 years) decreased significantly when the illumination information provided by the original digital photo was reduced by means of image scrambling (Experiment 1). This indicates that the illumination information is one potentially important factor contributing to the color ambiguity of #TheDress—possibly by amplification of a slight principal difference in psychophysics of color perception which the two observer groups showed for abstract uniformly colored fields displaying a white–blue ambiguity (Experiment 2).

Da Vinci's Mona Lisa entering the next dimension

For several of Leonardo da Vincis paintings, such as The Virgin and Child with St Anne or the Mona Lisa, there exist copies produced by his own studio. In case of the Mona Lisa, a quite exceptional, rediscovered studio copy was presented to the public in 2012 by the Prado Museum in Madrid. Not only does it mirror its famous counterpart superficially; it also features the very same corrections to the lower layers, which indicates that da Vinci and the ‘copyist’ must have elaborated their panels simultaneously. On the basis of subjective (thirty-two participants estimated painter-model constellations) as well as objective data (analysis of trajectories between landmarks of both paintings), we revealed that both versions differ slightly in perspective. We reconstructed the original studio setting and found evidence that the disparity between both paintings mimics human binocular disparity. This points to the possibility that the two Giocondas together might represent the first stereoscopic image in world history.

Stable aesthetic standards delusion: changing 'artistic quality' by elaboration.

The present study challenges the notion that judgments of artistic quality are based on stable aesthetic standards. We propose that such standards are a delusion and that judgments of artistic quality are the combined result of exposure, elaboration, and discourse. We ran two experiments using elaboration tasks based on the repeated evaluation technique in which different versions of the Mona Lisa had to be elaborated deeply. During the initial task either the version known from the Louvre or an alternative version owned by the Prado was elaborated; during the second task both versions were elaborated in a comparative fashion. After both tasks multiple blends of the two versions had to be evaluated concerning several aesthetic key variables. Judgments of artistic quality of the blends were significantly different depending on the initially elaborated version of the Mona Lisa, indicating experience-based aesthetic processing, which contradicts the notion of stable aesthetic standards.

Attitudes and cognitive distances: On the non-unitary and flexible nature of cognitive maps.

Spatial relations of our environment are represented in cognitive maps. These cognitive maps are prone to various distortions (e.g., alignment and hierarchical effects) caused by basic cognitive factors (such as perceptual and conceptual reorganization) but also by affectively loaded and attitudinal influences. Here we show that even differences in attitude towards a single person representing a foreign country (here Barack Obama and the USA) can be related to drastic differences in the cognitive representation of distances concerning that country. Europeans who had a positive attitude towards Obama’s first presidential program estimated distances between US and European cities as being much smaller than did people who were skeptical or negative towards Obama’s ideas. On the basis of this result and existing literature, arguments on the non-unitary and flexible nature of cognitive maps are discussed.

On the Nature of the Background Behind Mona Lisa

One of the many questions surrounding Leonardo’s Mona Lisa concerns the landscape visible in the portrait’s background: Does it depict an imagination of Leonardo’s mind, a real world landscape or the motif of a plane canvas that hung in Leonardo’s studio, behind the sitter? By analyzing divergences between the Mona Lisa and her Prado double that was painted in parallel but from another perspective the authors found mathematical evidence for the motif-canvas hypothesis: The landscape in the Prado version is 10% increased but otherwise nearly identical with the Louvre one, which indicates both painters used the same plane motif-canvas as reference.

Social Factors in Aesthetics: Social Conformity Pressure and a Sense of Being Watched Affect Aesthetic Judgments:

The present study is a first attempt to experimentally test the impact of two specific social factors, namely social conformity pressure and a sense of being watched, on participants’ judgments of the artistic quality of aesthetic objects. We manipulated conformity pressure with a test form in which a photograph of each stimulus was presented together with unanimously low (downward pressure) or high quality ratings (upward pressure) of three would-be previous raters. Participants’ sense of being watched was manipulated by testing each of them in two settings, one of which contained an eyespots stimulus. Both social factors significantly affected the participants’ judgments—unexpectedly, however, with conformity pressure only working in the downward direction and eyespots leading to an overall downward shift in participants’ judgments. Our findings indicate the relevance of including explicit and implicit social factors in aesthetics research, thus also reminding us of the limitations of overly reductionist approaches to investigating aesthetic perception and experience.

The Sense of Being Watched Is Modulated by Arousal and Duration of the Perceptual Episode

The mere presence of a depiction of eyes can elicit a sense of being watched in the perceiver. To this date, the factors affecting the intensity of this sense of being watched, however, have not been investigated. In the present experiment, we tested the impact of two potentially relevant variables: arousal (manipulated using specific musical pieces) and duration of the perceptual episode (manipulated using presentation times of 200 ms and 10 s, respectively). We asked participants to report how intensely they felt being watched while we exposed them to various observation cues ranging from human eyes to surveillance cameras. We found that, on average, reported intensities were higher if participants were in a state of relatively higher arousal and if the perceptual episode during which the respective observation cues were presented lasted long enough (10 s) to allow more than a first glance. Scientific and practical implications are briefly discussed.

Navigating through a volumetric world does not imply needing a full three-dimensional representation

Abstract: Jeffery et al. extensively and thoroughly describe how different species navigate through a three-dimensional environment. Undeniably, the world offers numerous three-dimensional opportunities. For most navigation tasks, we argue, a twodimensional representation is nevertheless sufficient, as physical conditions and limitations such as gravity, thermoclines, or layers of earth encountered in a specific situation provide the very elevation data the navigating individual needs.