Leonardo

Comments on Deregowski's Analysis of Seeing a Picture for the First TimeAuthor(s): John M. KennedySource: Leonardo, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Summer, 1976), pp. 219-221Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1573560 .

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Leonardo, Vol. 9, pp. 219-221. Pergamon Press 1976. Printed in Great Britain

COMMENTS ON DEREGOWSKI'S ANALYSIS OF SEEING A PICTURE FOR THE FIRST TIME

John M. Kennedy*

J. B. Deregowski [1] has considered the question: What happens when persons see a picture for the first time and it is their first time to see that kind of picture ? He presents three possible answers: (1) A kind of gradual increase in clarity precedes recognition, the time taken depending on the viewer's familiarity with pictures in general. (2) The process requires integrating widely scattered but clearly perceived items into a coherent whole. (3) The answer he prefers is the hypothesis that the viewer makes a hypothesis on the basis of a sample of the picture, tests it against another sample, revises if necessary, samples again, and con- tinues this process till no further modification is necessary.

Why does he reject answers (1) and (2)? The reason is that both postulate units, either the entire picture (1) or individual items (2). He claims that one does not perceive all the units with equal clarity (an objection to (1)), and the individual items answer (2) leads to an infinite regress, for the larger items must depend on smaller items, those on still smaller items, etc.

His analysis comes at a time when a good deal of research on picture perception has been gathered together from a wide variety of disciplines-cross- cultural studies, animal learning, child development and psychophysics, to name but the main ones [2]. His article deserves a careful reading, because it addresses one of the issues on which research has begun to focus. Instead of asking do untrained viewers

.understand pictures? the question is being posed in the form how do they begin to cope with the different elements [3] ofpictures?

The first point, one should note, is that while Dere- gowski quotes many reports on people in low-tech- nology societies, none of the reports unequivocally supports any of the answers that he offers to his basic question. He says that some of the things said by these informants are noteworthy and striking and their similarity from one tribe to another, at times, is startling. But it is also evident that the various hypo- theses offered can garner some support from the available evidence. Consider his work with the Me'en Ethiopians. One of them mentioned the overall shape before the parts: 'It looks like a cow. [These are] its horns, legs, tail, ear. It is a cow'. Another seems to see the parts before the whole: 'That is a tail. This is a foot. That is a leg joint. Those are horns .... Let

* Psychology Dept., Scarborough College, University of Toronto, West Hill, Ontario M1C 1A4, Canada. (Received 8 Mar. 1976.)

me look and I will tell you. In my country this is a water buck'. Another one clearly engages in checking and modifying, changing his original identifications of the whole. 'It looks like an aeroplane .... These [the legs] look like aeroplane wings .... This looks like a man's head. Those look like his legs. It's a man'.

Surely it is only sensible, and common experience, that the process of recognition is quite variable. Consider, for example, that occasionally an entire silhouette of an object is readily understandable, no other detail being necessary. At other times, the internal detail is necessary, for the global silhouette is ambiguous or indefinite. At still other times, par- ticularly with cleverly designed pictures, one may find oneself beginning by picking the wrong meaning for an ambiguous detail and then, when one notices another feature, one realizes that the initial impression has to be revised. These are common experiences and it is easy for an accomplished picture-maker to arrange displays that invoke these experiences. Consequently, there is no reason, in practice, to select one process as the only true, real one.

Now I turn from empirical matters to logic and recall that Deregowski rejected answer (2) on the grounds that it led to an infinite regress. He implies that any process that appeals to the parts in a whole leads to an infinite regress. Of course, some do, but it is a mistake to suppose that all do. In practice, it may simply be that sometimes a recognizable part (e.g., an eye, in detail) allows one to realize that the general rounded silhouette is a head. There is no necessary implication here that the eye is a shape that requires one to decipher a part (e.g., an eyelash) before one recognizes the whole eye. Rather, one may recog- nize the eyelash because it is in the correct place in an unambiguous over-all configuration (i.e., the whole eye).

Now, having considered Deregowski's question-and- answers on their own grounds, let me turn to a graver issue. The suspicion to be entertained is that his analysis really has very little, if anything, to do with picture perception per se. Let me put it like this: the processes he considers could be invoked by a dim object, an irregularly lit object, a hazy scene or even simply some familiar thing in an unfamiliar orienta- tion. Where are the factors that are really restricted to picture perception proper or best examined via picture perception ? He gives us no satisfactory solution to this issue.

Now there are, in fact, a set of important and curious processes that are distinctive to picture perception. In

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John M. Kennedy

other words, there are a number of features of pictures that are not found in non-pictorial objects and picture perception is the skill required to deal with these features. The aim in studying picture perception should be to try to find out who can employ these special skills, when and how.

Firstly, pictures are flat surfaces that depict things other than themselves, distant or imaginary scenes. The viewer must be able to unglue the true flatness of the picture's surface, hold it in abeyance, and treat the information for the pictured world somewhat separately.

Secondly, the flatness information must not be forgotten entirely or one will suffer trompe l'oeil and, possibly, be unable to compensate for viewing from incorrect viewpoints, because one will not be able to recognize that one is examining a depicted scene via a canvas at a particular location (see also point six below).

It is exactly this ability to keep distinct, but inter- related, the picture's surface and the pictured world that is the heart of pictorial perception, where the viewer can see both 'in depth' and 'flat' in the same direction. It is an anomalous kind of transparency, one might say.

Thirdly, pictures are not replicas, not scale models. They necessarily leave out information. The skilled viewer must know the implications of omitted things, like absent details in a line drawing or no colours in a black and white photo [4, 5, 6]. One might call this selective inattention.

Fourthly, the limited set of elements that are genuinely present are often surrogates for a whole variety of things, the way a line can stand for an edge, a crack, a wire, a corer, etc. The fact that the element is constant, but the referent changes from place to place in the picture is a puzzle of depiction that is only beginning to be solved. Eyes must know the code of the elements, and when and how to invoke it.

Fifthly, the overall structure of the depicted scene or object can introduce special problems distinctive to pictorial representation. For example, the overall scene can be an impossible object, an Escher fantasy that violates the laws of nature. Precisely because Euclidean space is less flexible than pictorial space, there are distinctive phenomena in pictorial perception.

Sixthly, consider a picture of a picture. As Pirenne [7] has pointed out admirably, one can view a picture of a real object from a slant, but one cannot obtain the same view of the object from any slant. Pictures should violate certain laws of perceptual constancy when viewed from the side. In an experienced viewer's eyes they do not and here is a special capacity worth the name of a pictorial skill. On the other hand, the viewer of a picture of a picture usually finds that his constancy mechanisms have broken down and the depiction of a depicted object, which might be say, a man, looks strangely flattened like a cut-out doll. Compare: In nature, shadows can 'depict' a man, but there are no natural shadows of shadows, so pictures can introduce more levels of representation than nature.

Seventhly, there is the remarkable question of the relationship between recognition and perception. Often, given an outline drawing, one recognizes a solid object and sees it as 3-dimensional looking at the same time. But if the object had well-known colour markings, like a familiar flag or a common animal, one might recog- nize the pattern, but one would not see the colours.

So people can recognize and see depth while recognizing but not seeing colour. There are also cases where one can see depicted colour and brightness in black and white drawings [8], even if no particular object is recognized, as in the illustration.

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A bright centre can be seen, with an apparent brightness greater than the surrounding areas, even though the surface is actually physically uniform. With careful inspection, one can also see 'Bradley extension contours', illusory lines joining some of the opposite pairs of lines. Children spon- taneously identify the effects as 'not-real' which suggests the underlying ability is like reading pictures without suffering trompe l'oeil.

It is possible to draw parallels between pictures and shadows, pictures and transparency, pictures and silhouettes. The parallels succeed to a certain extent and stop at particular points, e.g., shadows of shadows are impossible, transparency looks out on genuine depth not pictured depth, silhouettes are rounded and not actually flat, in the sense that one can survey the silhouetted object from different vantage points and it will change as a solid object should. It is important to keep both the parallels and their limitations in mind in considering picture perception. Only then will one be able to define the intriguing perceptual process- only then will one avoid red herrings, unrevealing discussions that are not focused properly on the skills at issue.

In sum, Deregowski does a considerable service in raising the fundamental issue as regards the difficulties facing novices who view a picture for the first time, be they technologically unsophisticated, infants-or other kinds of animals! But the answers that he offers confuse general characteristics of puzzled vision with the special questions raised by picture viewing. To make the point clear, I have listed several of the singular characteristics of pictorial representation.

References

1. J. B. Deregowski. On Seeing a Picture for the First Time, Leonardo 9, 19 (1976).

2. J. M. Kennedy. A Psychology of Picture Perception (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1974) Chaps. 4, 5.

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Comments on Deregowski's Analysis of Seeing a Picture for the First Time

3. J. M. Kennedy and J. Silver. The Surrogate Functions of Lines in Visual Perception: Evidence from Antipodal Rock and Cave Artwork Sources, Perception 3, 313 (1974).

4. R. Arnheim, Entropy and Art (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1971).

5. E. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1960) pp. 330-342.

6 . J.M. Kennedy. Perception, Pictures and the Etcetera Principle. In R. B. MacLeod and H. Pick, Perception (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1974).

7. M. H. Pirenne. Optics, Painting and Photography. (Cambridge: The University Press, 1970).

8. J. M. Kennedy, Attention, Brightness and the Con- structive Eye. In M. Henle, Vision and Artefact (New York: Springer, in press).

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