Peak Shift Effect I think the focus on caricature helped me understand this effect the most. The idea of chasing an essence, by extracting and amplifying certain features, also seems applicable in other forms of art that try to capture an experience. The animal examples of the rats and birds were also interesting, since they seemed to hold an exaggerated ideal as more stimulating than the original thing they were interested in.

Contrast Extraction I think the example given in the article about the orientation/color borders was interesting because I wonder if there is a hierarchy for what features we choose to distinguish between. Do we find the bottom image to be divided by color because color is more identifiable than orientation, or is it just in this specific example? Using their ideas of biological perception, could there maybe be a reason for why certain features are privileged in this law, or does it completely depend on the situation.

Abhorrence of Unique Viewpoints This was happening before this section, but one thing I had issue with was how firmly they asserted that certain things were “pleasing” as compared to others. I found that in the third example in this section, with the palm tree, I thought the first image was more pleasing even though it was more “coincidental.” Other examples compared sketches to photographs in terms of how “pleasing” they were, and I never felt convinced when this was used as evidence. Maybe another law can explain why I find the first image more pleasing though, since I do think the repetition was exactly what made me like the image.