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Experiments
on the role of painted cues in Hughes’s reverspectives
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Thomas V Papathomas
'Perception' journal issue 31, pages 521-530
Laboratory of Vision Research and Department of Biomedical Engineering,
Rutgers University
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Abstract. The English artist Patrick Hughes has created an extraordinary
class of painted artpieces, most commonly referred to as ‘reverspectives’.
They consist of truncated pyramids and prisms with their smaller faces
closer to the viewer, in such a way as to allow a realistic scene to
be painted on them. The works of art contain rich perspective and other
painted cues that conspire to elicit an illusory depth percept that
is the reverse of the physical depth arrangement. This reverse depth
is obtained under a wide range of viewing conditions, and competes with
the veridical depth percept in a classical bistable paradigm that was
found to exhibit a high degree of hysteresis. Under the illusory depth
percept, reverspectives appear to move vividly as the viewer moves in
front of them. This paper reports two experiments that were designed
to assess the effectiveness of the painted cues in eliciting the illusory
depth percept by using three different measures for the strength of
the illusion. As expected, the illusion was favored by monocular viewing
and large viewing distances. The results from these two experiments
are in close agreement with each other, and they indicate that the painted
cues are powerful in influencing the ultimate percept.
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