Fast lemons and sour boulders:Testing crossmodal correspondences using an internet-based testing methodology

Abstract. According to a popular family of hypotheses, crossmodal matches between distinct features hold because they correspond to the same polarity on several conceptual dimensions (such as active–passive, good–bad, etc.) that can be identified using the semantic differential technique. The main problem here resides in turning this hypothesis into testable empirical predictions. In the present study, we outline a series of plausible consequences of the hypothesis and test a variety of well-established and previously untested crossmodal correspondences by means of a novel internet-based testing methodology. The results highlight that the semantic hypothesis cannot easily explain differences in the prevalence of crossmodal associations built on the same semantic pattern (fast lemons, slow prunes, sour boulders, heavy red); furthermore, the semantic hypothesis only minimally predicts what happens when the semantic dimensions and polarities that are supposed to drive such crossmodal associations are made more salient (e.g., by adding emotional cues that ought to make the good/bad dimension more salient); finally, the semantic hypothesis does not explain why reliable matches are no longer observed once intramodal dimensions with congruent connotations are presented (e.g., visually presented shapes and colour do not appear to correspond)

Mona Lisa, the stochastic view and fractality in color space

A painting consists of objects which are arranged in specific ways. The art of painting is drawing the objects, which can be considered as known trends, in an expressive manner. Detrended methods are suitable for characterizing the artistic works of the painter by eliminating trends. It means that we study the paintings, regardless of its apparent purpose, as a stochastic process. We apply multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis to characterize the statistical properties of Mona Lisa, as an instance, to exhibit the fractality of the painting. Our results show that Mona Lisa is long range correlated and almost behaves similar in various scales.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figures, to appear in Int. J. Mod. Phys.

Modality and uncertainty in data visualizations : A corpus approach to the use of connecting lines

publishedVersionPaid Open Acces

1/f2 Characteristics and Isotropy in the Fourier Power Spectra of Visual Art, Cartoons, Comics, Mangas, and Different Categories of Photographs

Art images and natural scenes have in common that their radially averaged (1D) Fourier spectral power falls according to a power-law with increasing spatial frequency (1/f2 characteristics), which implies that the power spectra have scale-invariant properties. In the present study, we show that other categories of man-made images, cartoons and graphic novels (comics and mangas), have similar properties. Further on, we extend our investigations to 2D power spectra. In order to determine whether the Fourier power spectra of man-made images differed from those of other categories of images (photographs of natural scenes, objects, faces and plants and scientific illustrations), we analyzed their 2D power spectra by principal component analysis. Results indicated that the first fifteen principal components allowed a partial separation of the different image categories. The differences between the image categories were studied in more detail by analyzing whether the mean power and the slope of the power gradients from low to high spatial frequencies varied across orientations in the power spectra. Mean power was generally higher in cardinal orientations both in real-world photographs and artworks, with no systematic difference between the two types of images. However, the slope of the power gradients showed a lower degree of mean variability across spectral orientations (i.e., more isotropy) in art images, cartoons and graphic novels than in photographs of comparable subject matters. Taken together, these results indicate that art images, cartoons and graphic novels possess relatively uniform 1/f2 characteristics across all orientations. In conclusion, the man-made stimuli studied, which were presumably produced to evoke pleasant and/or enjoyable visual perception in human observers, form a subset of all images and share statistical properties in their Fourier power spectra. Whether these properties are necessary or sufficient to induce aesthetic perception remains to be investigated

Ambient Cognitive Environments and the Distributed Synthesis of Visual Ambiences

International audienceOne of the current trends in computer science leads to the design of computing organizations based on the activity of a multitude of tiny cheap decentralized computing entities. Whether these chips are integrated into paintings or disseminated in open environments like dust, the fundamental problem lies in their cooperative operation so that global functions are obtained collectively. In this paper, we address the issue of the creation of visual ambiences based on the coordinated activity of computing entities. These entities are distributed randomly on a 2D canvas and can only change their own color and perceive their immediate neighbors