Vision and Expectations, Why We See What We See

David Dunlop is the perfect teacher:  knowledgeable, enthusiastic, energetic, a performer.  And as the kick-off speaker in The White Gallery’s 2010 lecture series last Saturday, he kept a full house mesmerized with 45 minutes of fact- and example-filled comments on the psychology of vision. How we see the world and, in particular, how we see art.

   We don’t control our vision and what and how we see nearly as much as we think we do, Dunlop declared. Our vision comes down from Pleistocene people, “80,000 generations influencing us.â€�  

   We learn vision just as we learn language.

   At first, babies see blurs; then they begin to look for “savannas,â€�  horizontal plains with little depth.  Later they will look for more sophisticated scenes always observed from a safe distance; later still from a “prospect,â€� up high, seeing the world from afar, distinguishing danger from safety.  (Think of Turner landscapes, or the paintings of our own Frederik Church, with their enormous sense of distance between the awesome, often dangerous natural world — the sublime, as the ancient Greeks called it — and the viewer.

   With learned vision comes learned expectations. We look for what we want to see. When the expected context is changed our brain must create a new mental model to deal with new information.

   As an example, a shirt that is red in a white light is no longer red in a green or blue light. Put a figure in a landscape painting, and we no longer look at the trees. Put concentric circles against a geometric background and we no longer see the circles; we see the famous Fraser’s Spiral.

    Dunlop said the mental model and our vision is inspired by unconscious knowledge and beliefs. He cited a study of pain to show that our brain has already made decisions before we consciously know them.  We bring this unconscious knowledge and belief to viewing art.  We select and deselect what we see.

   Only a “crisisâ€� can force the brain to shift to a new paradigm.  Art takes what you’ve always seen and says, “You’ve missed something.  Look again.  There’s something new here.â€� Artists use what they see in the world to trigger a new line, a new world. They paint from their memory of vision, from their senses, feelings.  Remember Picasso’s famous dictum, “Follow the paint.â€�

   Dunlop pointed to three of his own works hanging in the White Gallery to demonstrate how artists fool the eye.  In each, a stationary figure — either on a New York City street or in Grand Central Terminal — is surrounded by blurred figures. The viewer sees motion when there is none.  The brain has been forced into a new visual model.