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Trompe l’oeil and the Dorsal/Ventral Account of Picture Perception

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Abstract

While there has been a lot of discussion of picture perception both in perceptual psychology and in philosophy, these discussions are driven by very different background assumptions. Nonetheless, it would be mutually beneficial to arrive at an understanding of picture perception that is informed by both the philosophers’ and the psychologists’ story. The aim of this paper is exactly this: to give an account of picture perception that is valid both as a philosophical and as a psychological account. I argue that seeing trompe l’oeil paintings is, just as some philosophers suggested, different from other cases of picture perception. Further, the way our perceptual system functions when seeing trompe l’oeil paintings could be an important piece of the psychological explanation of perceiving pictures.

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Notes

  1. It is easy to block this conclusion as long as we allow for the temporally complex experience of trompe l’oeil pictures, of which only the first stage is the one where we are fooled.

  2. I focused on the 3D Ebbinghaus illiusion because of the simplicity of the results, but it needs to be noted that the experimental conditions of this experiment have been criticized recently. The main line of criticism is that experimental design of the grasping experiment and the perceptual judgment experiment is very different. When the subjects grasp the middle chip, there is only one middle chip, surrounded by either smaller or larger chips. When they are judging the size of the middle chip, however, they are comparing two chips – one surrounded by smaller chips, the other by larger ones (Pavani et al. 1999, Franz 2001, 2003, Franz et al. 2000, 2003, see also Gillam 1998, Vishton 2004 and Vishton and Fabre 2003, but see Haffenden and Goodale 1998 and Haffenden et al. 2001 for a response). See Briscoe 2008 for a good philosophically sensitive overview of this question. Those who are moved by Franz et al. style considerations can substitute some other visual illusion, namely, the Müller-Lyer illusion, the Ponzo illusion, the hollow face illusion or the Kanizsa compression illusion, where there is evidence that the illusion influences our perceptual judgments, but not our perceptually-guided actions.

  3. I want to leave open the question about just what ‘malfunctioning’ means here. Different degrees of malfunctioning presumably lead to different problems with picture perception.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Philosophical Psychology, University of Antwerp, D 413, Grote Kauwenberg 18, 2000, Antwerp, Belgium

    Bence Nanay

  2. Senior Research Associate Peterhouse, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom

    Bence Nanay

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Nanay, B. Trompe l’oeil and the Dorsal/Ventral Account of Picture Perception. Rev.Phil.Psych. 6, 181–197 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0219-y

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