Vision: The Art of Evolution

Abstract

There has been an effort to foster a dialogue between art and vision science based on the observation that artists have previously discovered and taken advantage of the properties of our visual system in their paintings, often much before vision science has come to those conclusion. It has been proposed that both art and brain utilize an ‘alternative physics’ to simplify the visible world in a manner that does not offend the viewer’s eye or interfere with understanding a visual scene. However, the attempt at allowing art and brain to learn from each other is hampered by trying to relate fragmented knowledge about the underlying principles and techniques of each camp. To more precisely forge a common language between the two, it is helpful to understand why regularities in both artistic representation and the visual system have come to be. Recent theories have begun to explain from an evolutionary perspective why our vision has certain properties and why certain principles of art are effective. Here we outline evidence for how art has come to harness our visual capacity by explicating how parts of the visual hierarchy respond to a variety of stimuli; the mechanisms of binocularity; depth perception; how subdivisions of the visual system process information differently as evidenced by artistic techniques; the mechanisms of visual illusions; how visual hallucinations are coded in our visual cortex; why we evolved color vision; how the brain interprets color information in art; modes of perspective and constancy; and concepts of beauty in art. This discussion provides an understanding of the common functions of art and brain to paint a visual ecology that underscores a relationship that transcends the formal distinctions between art and science.