Learning an Artist's Style: Just What Does a Pigeon See in a Picasso?

Judgments of style in art, music, and literature are commonplace, although the mechanisms providing for this structural sensitivity are not well understood. Watanabe, Sakamoto, and Wakita (1995) showed that pigeons trained to discriminate colour slides of paintings of Picasso from those of Monet could generalise this discrimination not only to new paintings of Picasso and Monet, but also to paintings of other cubist and impressionist painters. These results suggest that the bases for such judgments of artistic style may be simpler than normally thought. This tacit sensitivity to artistic style is explored in terms of a simple PCA network model applied to pixel-maps of the paintings. The eigenvectors obtained from the singular value decomposition of sets of these pixel-maps provide for descriptions of the stimuli in terms of visual “macro-features”. These macro-features provide a simple basis not only for recognising previously-experienced paintings, but for the successful discrimination of novel paintings into various style categories. A summary of simulations of the performance of Watanabe et al.’s pigeons using precisely the same stimuli and tasks is provided. The results suggest that the eigen-decomposition is a necessary first-step, and that the bases for judgments of style may indeed be quite simple

Psychological Sketches (7th Edition)

Permission to include in the University of Lethbridge Institutional Repository granted by Dr. John Vokey.Each of the chapters in this book is a short sketch of a particular topic in psychology. They can be read in any order as each chapter is meant to be a self-contained story. By the end of the book, we hope you will have learned what experimental psychology is about, what experimental psychologists do, and more specifically, what experimental psychologists do in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Lethbridge

Thinking with data (4th Edition)

Permission to include in the University of Lethbridge Institutional Repository granted by Dr. John Vokey.This book comprises a collection of lecture notes for the statistics component of the course Psychology 2030: Methods and Statistics from the Department of Psychology at the University of Lethbridge. In addition to basic statistical methods, the book includes discussion of many other useful topics. For example, it has a section on writing in APA format (see Chapter 17), and another on how to read the professional psychological literature (see Chapter 16). We even provide a subsection on the secret to living to be 100 years of age (see section A.2.2)- although the solution may not be fully satisfactory! Despite this volume comprising the fourth edition of the book, it is still very much a work in progress, and is by no means complete. However, despite its current limitations, we expect that students will find it to be a useful adjunct to the lectures. We welcome any suggestions on additions and improvements to the book, and, of course, the report of any typos and other errors. Please email any such errors or corrections to: [email protected] or [email protected]

Psychological Sketches (8th Edition)

Permission to include in the University of Lethbridge Institutional Repository granted by Dr. John Vokey.Each of the chapters in this book is a short sketch of a particular topic in psychology. They can be read in any order as each chapter is meant to be a self-contained story. By the end of the book, we hope you will have learned what experimental psychology is about, what experimental psychologists do, and more specifically, what experimental psychologists do in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Lethbridge