Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to K Overbeeke.
This paper describes a noninvasive, relatively inexpensive, and simple to use system developed by the authors for monitoring the visual inspection behavior of someone free to select any viewing angle of an object by moving about it while at the same time being able to rotate it. A demonstration experiment verifies the potential of the system to study 3-D form perception.
This research tested the visual rightness theory of pictorial composition's assertion that the induced organizational structure of a visually right (i.e., "good") design is perceptually salient and judged superior by anyone viewing it regardless of his or her training in the visual arts. Stimuli for Experiments 1 and 2 consisted of 16 reproductions of paintings by renowned artists and an experimentally reconstructed less-well-organized version of each art stimulus. It was found that design professionals (Experiment 2) were significantly more successful at detecting the original versions than were participants untrained in the visual arts (Experiment 1) (hit rates = 64% and 55%, respectively). In Experiment 3 participants replaced a major structural element removed from each of six pictures of the stimulus set at the location where they thought it appears in the original. A significant number of untrained participants and those with training in design theory were in agreement as to the location of each element within its pictorial field; the location chosen conformed to its compositional structure but not its actual location in the original. Findings demonstrate that the ability to detect the induced structural skeleton of a painting resulting from a visually right design does not require expert knowledge of design principles whereas the ability to discriminate between several articulation possibilities of the same composition does require formal training.
Design-trained subjects sorted fourteen solid forms under either visual or haptic conditions into groups on the basis of perceived similarity of balance or along a balance continuum. After these tasks of coarse and fine discrimination, each form was rated on ten bipolar stimulus attributes. Multidimensional scaling and property-fitting analyses were performed on the results of four experiments to determine the combined contribution of stimulus attributes and level of discrimination on the visual and haptic percept of balance. A balance dimension emerged for both modalities, but only when subjects were inclined to attend globally to the structure of a form by the coarse-discrimination task. Results indicate that visual balance is a holistic property of forms which derives from the synthesis of physical stimulus information. For touch, subjects appear to have equated balance with a symmetric distribution of weight/shape about the central axis of a form. Findings are related to theoretical notions of balance.