Vision Spontaneously Establishes the Percept of Pictorial Balance

Abstract

The present experiment sought empirical evidence that pictorial balance can be detected spontaneously with the first glance at a painting. Stimuli consisted of color and black-and-white reproductions or adaptations of structurally balanced paintings and one or more reconstructed less balanced versions of each work of art. Art-trained and untrained subjects rated the compositions for balance on a 6-point Likert scale after presentation durations which permitted either a single fixation (100 ms) or multiple fixations (5 s). The results show that both naive and sophisticated participants discriminated the less balanced from the more balanced versions of the black-and-white paintings with a single glance at each. They were also able to discern differences in balance among the color stimuli in the single fixation condition, but not the subtle differences in balance between the two versions of each painting. Subjects' assessment of a composition's balance based on stimulus information encoded with one fixation did not significantly change when exposure duration permitted multiple fixations of that composition. Data are consistent with the view that the induced structural organization resulting from the balanced configuration of a painting's element is detected spontaneously by the eye “at first glance.”