Department of Psychology
"That's a lovely picture. What is it?"
How we make sense of what others draw
Perhaps we have all been charmed by a work of art, despite an inability to see what the artist actually intended amongst the lines and squiggles. A unique collaboration between Dr Ben Dyson, director of the H.E.A.R. lab, and UK visual artist Rachel Cohen provided insights into how we are able to get meaning from ambiguous visual information. The study produced novel artworks in their own right by asking non-artists to copy original drawings of objects and animals provided by Rachel. As a result of asking different individuals to repeatedly copy the drawings, the images went from being clear and recognizable to abstract and unidentifiable.
These sets of images were then presented in reverse order, and individuals were invited to name what they believed the image was changing back into. Individuals were quicker to identify the final object when the image started out from a familiar (or 'canonical') relative to a less familiar (or 'non-canonical') viewpoint. "The results are surprising based on what we know about how people traditionally learn to draw," said Rachel. ''Copying ought to be more accurate when the object seen is unfamiliar and so you would expect the non-canonical views to remain more stable, if anything. My guess is the copying is not better at all, but that the canonical images can become almost cartoonish as familiar details are preserved. But we would need to do another experiment to find out." As well as proposing further studies, Rachel has used participant responses to the images as the basis of artwork.
“When I met Rachel, she was already performing these 'experiments' in her artwork and I just offered to try and make her investigations a bit more formal," said Ben. "I think what's interesting about these kinds of data is that there's something distinctly human about the way in which images degrade when non-artists try to copy drawings. In Psychology, to make an image harder to identify, we usually add noise (like TV static) or make it dimmer (like turning down the brightness). This isn’t like that at all. Somehow, even when the image is pretty far gone, there still seems to be the hint of the original object in there that individuals recognize. I think that’s why looking at the way people interpret other’s drawings might be able to tell us some unique things about how we make sense of what we see, even though what we see might be ambiguous at first". The article is published in the February 2010 issue of Perception.
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