Why Perception is not always Right- the science bit

The act of perception consists in gathering information about the nature of what is the world around us. The information consists in cues about whether the display is near or distant, large or small, if it is moving, in how many parts it is constituted, how many colours are present. However, there can be bias in the act of perception.

A typical situation in which a bias in the perceptive system is likely to happen is in a situation of visual ambiguity. Ambiguity is possible when there is more than one possible solution for the same display. In a situation of ambiguity the brain is actually unable to decide which meaning is preferable.

Most of the time the perception deceives us because it goes for scheme, premade hypothesis that people use for a quicker understanding of the world. The Gestalt school was the first to stress the fact that the brain forms figures by grouping aspects of the stimulus into meaningful patterns. The Gestaltpsychologie, or Psychology of the Form, is a psychological stream born in the first decades of the Nineteenth Century (Bartoli, Giannini, Bonaiuto, 1996). The human mind acts like a computer with preregistered programs which are set according to these laws even if they distort the phenomenal reality of the display. So, there are pre-existing mental models that program how the display would be perceived.  

The “Functions of perception in the Museum” (2005) written by three Italian psychologists Gabriella Bartoli, Anna Maria Giannini and Paolo Bonaiuto categorized visual processes into 11 phenomena: completion, contradiction, adaptation, ambiguity/alternations, assimilation, contrast, masking, emphasis, relief/depth, motion, colour.

These are recognisable phenomena in the visual arts and also in fashion photography. As mentioned before, The Gestalt School studies the aesthetic experience as a universal fact which submits to very specific rules of perception. Contradictory images exploit human tendency to schematize what they seen in order to reduce complexity and arrive at closure. In such images the viewer expectations are subverted to create a feeling of oddity, strangeness, ambiguity.

 

 This Guy Bourdin photograph plays with the illusion of scale.

 Here there is a surreal effect created by an ambiguity in composition.

 An illusion of scale and composition creates the sense of ambiguity in this fashion photograph.

Guilia Piccioni