In this paper, Ramachandran and Hirstein outline an approach for understanding the laws of artistic experience. They describe eight such laws and analyze them in three components: the logic of art (the laws themselves), its evolutionary rationale (why and how the laws developed), and the neurophysiology (what happens in our brain from a scientific perspective). I thought the structure of the paper was very easy to follow and I really appreciated their attempt to understand the scientific reason why we view art in certain ways.

Peak Shift Principle : I really liked the explanation of the peak shift principle being applied in different dimensions. The concept that there are different “spaces” other than form space such as color space or even “beak space” that can be exaggerated or caricaturized was fascinating. They were able to compare this to how rats are more stimulated when recognizing longer/more exaggerated rectangles as opposed to the original rectangle presented to them showed that this response is measurable.

Generic Viewpoint: This concept reminded me of a previous topic we covered in class, the Gestalt Psychology’s Law of Prägnanz (Good Form). The Gestalt Law suggests that we tend to organize what we’re looking at into the simplest forms possible. However, I feel like the concept of Generic Viewpoint took the Law of Pragnanz and devloped it further in a manner which explains more clearly why we tend to do this through Bayesian Logic. The authors suggest that our visual system dislikes interpretations of art which rely on “strange coincidences” that are deemed improbable. For the most part, I feel like the examples given also further illustrated this with the overlapping signs and cube examples. I will note that for the picture with the palm tree, I had honestly preffered the first picture over the second (as did some of my friends), so I wasn’t able to quite understand why the second picture is generally considered preferable to the first one.

Contrast Extraction: I feel like this connects to the concept of juxtaposition that we had learned earlier and explains some of the scientific explanation for why juxtaposition is so effective. The authors state that cells in our retina respond to edges (changes in luminance) and don’t respond to homogenous surface colors in the same way. I thought the connection to camouflage was also really interesting, because I typically associate camouflage as “blending in” or “sameness” in a sense, but in this example the contrast being so easily extracted helped to hide some of the less noticable features. I also thought the distinction between contrast extraction and grouping was interesitng, as their effectiveness almost feels like opposites (dissimilar features that are physically close together vs the reward from grouping similar features together).