Ecological Perception Research, Visual Communication, and Aesthetics

139 Pages·1990·5.21 MB·English

by  Klaus Landwehr (auth.)

Recent Research in Psychology
Klaus Landwehr (Ed.)
Ecological
Perception Research,
Visual Communication,
and Aesthetics
Springer-Verlag
Berlin Heidelberg New York
London Paris Tokyo Hong Kong
Editor
Klaus Landwehr
Psychology Department, College of Arts and Sciences
Chiba University
Yayoi-cho, Chiba-shi, 260 Japan
and
University of Wuppertal, FB 3 - Psychology
GauBstr. 20, D-5600 Wuppertall, FRG
ISBN-13:978-3-540-52200-3 e-ISBN-13:978-3-642-84106-4
DOl: 10.1007/978-3-642-84106-4
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material
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© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 1990
212613140-543210 - Printed on acid-free paper
Prefa.ce
This book is the outcome of a meeting of eight students of perception and visual
communication, which meeting took place on October 9-10, 1987 at the SchloBpark-Hotel
at Bonn-Poppelsdorf, Federal Republic of Germany.
The meeting had been made possible by a basic grant from· the Ministry of Science of the
State of Nordrhein-Westfalen, Federal Republic of Germany, and additional support from
the German Society for Semiotics (DGS), and from the Institutions the participants had
been affiliated with at the time of the conference.
On behalf of the participants I should like to thank the above mentioned Institutions for
their support. Also, I want to thank Prof. J. Bredenkamp of the Psychology Department
of the University at Bonn, FRG, and Prof. R, Guski of the Psychology Department of the
University at Bochum, FRG, for supporting our endeavor at various stages.
Wuppertal and Chiba, November 3, 1989
Klaus Landwehr
Co:n.te:n.ts
1. Introduction: The ecological optics of information surfaces 1
Klaus Landwehr
Part I: Pictures, plans, drawings, and displays - surrogate information
and means for communication
2. Picture perception as "indirect" perception 15
Alan Costall
3. The communicative potential of pictures: eleven theses 23
Hartmut Espe
4. On two distinct and quintessential kinds of pictorial representation 29
Jan B. Deregowski
5. Meaning, presence and absence in pictures 43
John M. Kennedy, Paul Gabias & Ruggero Pierantoni
6. Decomposing optical stimulus information by pictures 57
Klaus Landwehr
7. Communicating design ideas: a pictorial essay 71
Ingrid Lempp
8. Functional versus dysfunctional aspects of information surfaces 81
Martin Krampen
VIII
Part II: Ecological aesthetics
9. The semiotics and aesthetics of surfaces and surface layouts 91
Martin Krampen
10. Ecological perception and aesthetics: pictures are affordance-free 100
Rolger Rage
11. The "aesthetic experience" as perceiving the general affordance of 123
explorability
Klaus Landwehr
12. Epilogue: Availability and affordances of information from 133
information surfaces
Klaus Landwehr
Subject index 137
Author index 139
List of contributors 143
1. I:n:trod:u.ction. : The ecol.ogica.l. optics of
in.forlDSLtion. s-u.:rfaces
K1aus Landwehr
1.1. J.J. Gibson's ecological approach to visual perception
J.J. Gibson's ecological approach to visual perception (1960a, 1961, 1966, 1979) is
antithesis to any picture theory of visual perception, yet it entails a most viable theory
of picture perception! Perceiving, for Gibson, is the coordinate tuning of "perceptual
systems", nothing less than complete, behaving organisms, to inexhaustively available,
continuously transforming "stimulus information". The perceiving of pictures or, rather,
the perceiving of something staticly depicted, obviously constitutes a significant issue to
such an account of visual perception. Conversely, it might be said that the traditional
theories of visual perception, which are based on the assumption that the retinal image,
or images, require further processing and analysis in certain sub-centers of the brain,
should have great difficulties in explaining visual perception as it occurs in our everyday
surroundings where "the stimulus" is quite unlike a static picture.
The ecological approach conceives of perception to be an emergent property of animal
environment systems, the constitutive variables of which are:
the layout of material substances and their surfaces to media of changing states -
water or air;
different kinds of energy fluxes, structured by reverberation at the interface of the
given surface layout and the media, or structured by diffusion within the media,
etc. ;
different kinds of organisms - animal species - evolved, and equipped with the
requisite abilities, to most efficiently and continuously adapt to changes in the first
mentioned groups of variables, changes which in part are brought about by the
animals themselves ~ through growth, locomotion, manipulation, etc.
The structured energy fluxes are considered to be information specifying, rather than
imposing, a certain range of possible behaviors. Thus, the organismic activity of
"perceiving" can be perfectly analyzed in terms of available stimulus information, its
material basis, and its utilization by the animal. Stimulus information, in turn, has to be
specified according to the material conditions to which it relates: for vision, it is
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continuously transforming across gradually changing conditions of illumination,
reflectance, etc. , as well as across movements of the observing organism, and motion and
changes of inanimate things and of other animals.
Gibson (1957) suggested that it is the invariant derivatives of these transformations which
must be considered the "effective stimuli" (cf. Gibson 1960b) such that behavior can be
demonstrated to be functionally (lawfully) related to such invariants (see Gibson 1979 for
further elaboration on this most essential point). The question which instantly arises in
relation to this conjecture is where the invariants are to be found in non-transforming
pictorial displays. Also, pictures, and the behavior of depicting something, seem to have
little to do with the natural, adaptive functions of perceptual behavior which is aimed at
the discrimination of substances, the detection of self-movement and of events, and the
exact differentiating of the spatial relations within, and relative to, a given layout of
surfaces.
1. 2. J.J. Gibson's ecological approach to picture perception
There are several contributions of J.J. Gibson's both to a theory of perception in general,
and visual perception more specificly (Gibson 1950, 1959, 1966, 1979), as well as to a
theory of (visual) picture perception (Gibson 1929, 1947, 1951, 1954, 1960c, 1971, 1979,
1980). Different as these contributions are, they nevertheless can be regarded as
supplementing, rather than being opposed, to each other. Disregarding the early Gestalt
phenomenological investigations for the moment, the basic observation which led Gibson
to recognize the perception of pictures as an important psychological problem, was that
photographs or motion pictures, which due to the laws of perspective are confined to one
correct station point for observation only, when being looked at from other points of
observation, will still be seen as correct, where they should look distorted (Gibson 1947).
This kind of compensation for oblique viewing will only break down if a picture of a
picture is being taken at an oblique angle and then shown at any other orientation (cf.
Pirenne 1970; Rosinski & Farber 1980).
Gibson always insisted that there ought to be one comprehensive definition of all kinds of
pictures, yet he continuously revised his own attempts towards this goal, and remained
dissatisfied with even his last proposals (Gibson 1979,1980). On the face of it there are
some common characteristics to all types of pictures, or, for that matter, all ways of
depicting; most importantly, we are always dealing with "a physical surface ... treated
or processed or acted upon in such a way that the light causes a perception of something
other than the surface itself" (Gibson 1960c, p.221). How is this possible?
Pictures, according to Gibson (1966, 1979), as well as written language and, eventually,
what colloquially is called "thinking" (cf. Gibson 1954), all come into existence by "the
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fundamental graphic act" which consists in:
"(changing) progressively the capacity of a surface to structure light by layout
or pigment, the progress of the change being co-incident with the movement of the
hand." (Gibson 1966, p.230)
The question then is: what are the principles of this "chirographic trace making" (Gibson
1954), which would guarantee that the resulting picture represents something specific
rather than anything. The most significant singularity in trace making is replicating or
copying which can be achieved either by coincidence tracing or by comparison tracing
(Gibson 1979). There is a natural model to such deliberate depiction in the mirroring of
anything above, and close to, even water surfaces. And in fact the early Renaissance
painters, when (re)discovering the geometrical laws of optical perspective (already
formulated by Euclid ~OO B. C. ), the knowledge and application of which enables one to
perfectly copy what is seen, seem to have used glass mirrors before they invented the
more flexible techniques of the grid veil and related devices (Alberti 1435; Durer 1525;
cf. Krautheimer 1956; Edgerton 1975).
The basic paradigm of depiction of that epoque, central perspective construction, was only
later found to be materialized in the optic apparatus of the human eye (Kepler 1604,
1611), and the eyes of many other animals as well, thus lending additional credence to the
veridicality of the established techniques for depiction, and, in turn, fostering the belief
that visual perception is essentially based on the sequential registering of pictures.
Since central perspective, as noted before, is restricted to one glance, from one station
point, in one direction, some artists (rather than the scientists!) opposed to the equating
of vision with the accepted mode of depiction: the more subjective-minded "impressionists"
and "expressionists" tried to depict their inner states and feelings, i.e. their individual
"perceptual experiences", while the more realist-minded "cubists" and related schools
tried to tackle the subjective continuity, and unity, of analyticly complex events by
integrating several views into one picture. Ironicly, pictures of the impressionist kind
look more realistic than cubist ones to the contemporary viewer.
Today, the Renaissance techniques are universally available, because automatized,
through cameras and photography, so much so that unsophisticated users get caught by
surprise if they inadvertently use inappropriate optics or unusual camera orientations,
while modern painters keep on struggling to depict the undepictable.
Central perspective and its general implementation in photography eventually came to
constitute the standard and criterium for the veridicality of any representation, but there
are pictures, most notably caricature drawings, on which we can and do see something
which in fact is not chirographically or otherwise marked on the picture surface (cf.
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Perkins &: Hagen 1980). This, then, leads us to a liberalized notion of image fidelity,
"functional fidelity", simply being "the degree to which the variables to which the eye is
sensitive are the same in one (optic) array as the other" (Gibson 1960, p.223). And this,
in turn, is the stepping stone to Gibson's most general definition of what a picture is:
"A picture is a surface so treated that a delimited optic array to a point of
observation is made available that contains the same kind of information that is
found in the ambient optic arrays of an ordinary environment." (Gibson 1971, p.31)
The "containing" of information must not be misunderstood to imply any similarity of a
picture to the object or scene pictured (cf. Gibson 1971, p.33; and Gibson 1973, 1979);
in fact we are dealing with a second-order specification: a picture specifies information,
i.e. the timeless and formless invariants of optical structure which, in turn, specify the
persisting layout of surfaces across changes of the place and path of observation, across
self-movements and object motion, etc. (Gibson 1979, p.287).
We might think of pictorial specification as being acquired by means of time-arrested
"forms", patterns, and texture. "Form" is a vague term of multifarious meanings, however
(cf. Gibson 1951). All chirographics of necessity has to begin as a line drawing, or a
patch etching, but that is exceptional, or can be regarded a special case of the former,
and it is the principles of this extension of the fundamental graphic act which deserve
further studying.
J .M. Kennedy (1974, ch.7) has described the scope of outline drawings in great detail,
and, summarizing what can be shown by such pictures, he states:
"Corners, whether convex or concave, occluding edges and occluding bounds, with
or without backgrounds, parallel combinations of features of surface layout like
wires or cracks, edges of shadows, highlights, and pigment boundaries - all yield
to outline along with texture discontinuities." (Kennedy 1974, p.132)
Because of this multiplicity of reference, a single line is often ambiguous in meaning,
thus, it becomes feasible to develop a metaphoric "language of outline" (cf. Kennedy 1974,
ch.8). However, it is not only the case that chirographic markings specify something
indefinite, worse still, sometimes substantial and optical discontinuities are specified
although no outline is being drawn at all! What matters, then, is not the marking as such
but its distribution: individual lines do not necessarily have to be in correspondence to
singular material and optical discontinuities, rather, the chirographic texture as a whole
specifies an optic array at the ecological level (cf. Gibson 1979, p.288: "nested
connections"). Still, we have to insist on the question of principles: do chirographic
textures perceptually behave like natural ones (cf. Gibson 1950), or according to
supervenient "Gestalt laws" (cf. Wertheimer 1923; Metzger 1953), or what?