Pictorial Cues in Art and in Visual Perception

Artists have been looking at the world for thousands of years, and thus paintings and drawings can be considered to form a  -year-old corpus of experimental psychology of perception. Through observation and trial-and-error they have exploited the principles of how our brains interpret the input from the retina, giving priority to only certain regularities of the visual pattern. Thus, a study of pictorial cues can tell us about the way that the brain recognizes objects, understands spatial depth, and uses illumination information in natural environments. Conversely, a better understanding of visual perception may help to explain the effectiveness of certain techniques used by artists. Therefore this essay will focus on some basic techniques in pictorial depiction that allow blobs of paint or charcoal marks to evoke objects, depth, movement, transparency, illumination, and refl ection. The development of these pictorial techniques by artists can be considered as fundamental discoveries about the neuroscience of perception.