Looking at Van Gogh’s Starry Night, we see not only its content (a French village beneath a night sky) but also its *style*. How does that work? How do we see style? In @nathumbehav.nature.com, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I take an experimental approach to style perception! osf.io/preprints/ps... - ThreadSky

talboger.bsky.social • 16 days ago

Looking at Van Gogh’s Starry Night, we see not only its content (a French village beneath a night sky) but also its *style*. How does that work? How do we see style?

In @nathumbehav.nature.com, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I take an experimental approach to style perception! https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/j7asd

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talboger.bsky.social•16 days ago

Style is the subject of considerable humanistic study, from art history to sociology to political theory. But a scientific account of style perception has remained elusive.

Using style transfer algorithms, we generated stimuli in various styles to use in psychophysics studies.

talboger.bsky.social•16 days ago

Here’s the idea: Seeing style involves ‘parsing’ content from form. The mind does this in other contexts too, like reading (separating typeface from letter identity) and maybe even color constancy (separating surface reflectance from lighting conditions).

adw.bsky.social•16 days ago

One question leaps to mind; do we, in fact, parse these things out, or is it just that we can if asked? I’m thinking about things like how taste is affected by the sight of the food and how that’s weird until you realise taste isn’t just about chemicals, although you can just ask about the chemicals

talboger.bsky.social•16 days ago

So, we thought, let’s study style perception like we study those processes! We adapted a number of paradigms used in those literatures to study how the mind represents style.

talboger.bsky.social•16 days ago

First, we were inspired by ‘font tuning’, wherein the mind adapts to typefaces in ways that aid text comprehension. Might similar effects arise for style? In other words, might perception tune to the style of images in ways that aid scene comprehension? We show: Yes!

talboger.bsky.social•16 days ago

Next, we considered cases of ‘discounting’ in vision, like when we discount lighting conditions to discern an object’s color, or when we discount a cloth to discern the object beneath it. We found similar effects for style: Vision discounts style to discriminate images.

talboger.bsky.social•16 days ago

But these cases involve extracting style to discard it in a sense. Might we also use style to generate new representations? Suppose you’re shown the fork and spoon from a styled cutlery set; can you imagine the knife? We used a priming task to find exactly these representations.

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