Gauge Fields in Pictorial Space

“Pictorial space” is the mental structure that appears to be the scaffold for the visual awareness when looking “into” (as opposed to “at”) a picture. Its structure differs from the “visual space” that is the scaffold for the visual awareness when looking into the scene in front of the observer. The structure of pictorial space has been probed empirically and explored theoretically. Here we propose a framework that allows one to handle cases that have been encountered empirically, but thus far have not been explored in a formal, geometrical setting. The framework allows one to handle many idiosyncrasies of human visual observers, as well as to characterize the (frequent) individual differences in a principled manner. This opens the door to a principled formalism of the structure (e.g., quality) of the pictorial spaces evoked by various methods of presentation, as required for applications.