Visual Perception in Karesansui Gardens

Japanese gardens are widely appreciated all over the world for sophisticated, minimal compositions and for the calm yet profound atmosphere which they engender. How are the visual elements of a garden, its rocks, moss, and shrubs, interpreted by the brain, and how do gardens achieve particular expressive and artistic effects? In this paper we suggest how principles of visual psychology can be used to gain insight into these aesthetic phenomena. The Gestalt psychologists [2] stressed the importance of the process of visual segmentation, the division, by the visual system, of a scene into figure and ground, as an early step in the analysis of a visual scene. The influential work of Koenderink et al. [1], analyzed the segmentation process further into the active description of a scene, at an intermediate stage of visual processing, in terms of the surface regions and bounding contours of objects. This process is roughly illustrated in figure 1.A. The process of visual segmentation, central and fundamental to the understanding of human vision, is not yet completely understood. The Gestalt school, provided a set of intuitive guidelines, still widely in use by perception researchers, for predicting the outcome of the process of grouping, or the formation of meaningful arrangements of visual elements. The main guidelines, often called Gestalt laws, are (see figure 1.C for simple examples):