Naming the appearance of patterned complex displays

RONCHI, LUCIA; CAIVANO, JOSE LUIS

ArgenColor 2002, Actas del Sexto Congreso Argentino del Color

Grupo Argentino del Color y Editorial La Colmena

Lugar: Buenos Aires; Año: 2004; p. 499 - 506

In textbooks one sees that the visual system was originally considered as an excellent zero instrument, and threshold data were gathered, to be used to formulate the basic visual functions. Thereafter, also suprathreshold perception was quantified. Next, entering the cognitive science, the problem of appearance was dealt with in quantitative terms. At this point, an elogiative tribute is due to César Jannello’s pioneering effort in setting a general theory of design, and the cesia, mainly developed by Caivano (Color Res. Appl. 16, 258-268, 1991; 19, 351-362, 1994). At the turn of the last century an apparently contradictory situation was instaured: on one side, vision experts were becoming aware of the incredibly large number of perceptual and cognitive “dimensions”; on the other side, the steps of perceptual organization (segregation, segmentation, internal representation) were becoming clear, while the limited “capacity” of visual process imposed the “bottleneck” of focused attention, through categorization and grouping, and similar, accompanied by the revival of the early concept of “the magic number seven plus or minus four”. Obviously, at this point, it should be recalled that the aim of cesia was just that of assessing visual appearance by broadening the number of involved dimensions. In turn, in another part of the world, J. J. Koenderink (CV Net, 2002, Jan. 12 and Feb. 3) proposed a research progran concerning natural visual tasks in structured environments, where various non-lambertian surfaces are present, with locally disordered surface structures and randomly distributed microgradients. In the available literature on cesia one finds that some aspects of perception can be dealt with separately from the traditional approach of visual colorimetry, however these two fields are somehow interrelated. The present poster aims at describing the results of an experiment, where various surfaces are tentatively classified through the assessment of their appearance in a widened sense: a)  There are flat and uniform samples, where standardized color naming is usually recognized as the descriptor of their local color appearance. b)  By the use of the local percentage of the four psychological primaries (red, green, yellow, blue, plus white content: 4+1 method). c)  By the categorical naming: eleven basic monolexemic names plus intracategory navigation. d)  There are patterned samples, where the local “naming” is insufficient and inadequate, and a new “naming” is here proposed. e)  There are samples where the assessment of appearance is based on cesia conceptualization. f)   There are samples where the best description seems to be the “naming” resulting from the interaction of methods described in the above points b) and d). Our proposal concerning point B) is as follows. We do not consider the sample at single, point, locations, but by minding its global patterning. We select a number of items, of various nature, as entries of a table. Each line of this table refers to a given (pattermed) sample, and crosses are drawn, correspondingly to the related entries (more than one, if needed). The list of the proposed entries includes: ·        The global impression of color may be labeled warm, cold, or none? ·        Is the sample glossy or matt? ·        Is the sample textured or untextured? ·        Do the displayed colors produce through-color-segmentation or not? ·        Do the displayed color produce clear grouping (e.g. figure-background distinction) or not? ·        What is the color of the background? ·        What is the location of the considered sample bewteen the two opposite poles, “unity” and “complexity” (which involves more variation and incongruent patterns, being camouflage a limiting case)? ·        Is the number of different displayed colors greater or smaller than the magic number seven plus or minus four? ·        Which are the prevailing colors (in terms of categorical naming)? ·        Which color “pops-out”? or, does the pattern exhibit a clear RVSI (in the sense of Mitsuo Ikeda’s recognized visual space of illumination)? ·        Which acts as an unwanted distractor? ·        What are the secondary colors?