Fatemeh Charkhtab Basim¹ (), Michael A. Webster; ¹University of Nevada, Reno

Painting styles such as impressionism involve coarse application of color, resulting in a blotchy perception of discrete strokes or daubs when viewed from a close distance while appearing more fused and natural from a far distance. But how does it look to the painter? We asked whether artists might adapt to the visual textural qualities of their paintings. Stimuli were images of 1/f color noise formed by combining separate noise images for the red, green, and blue components, and subtended 7.5 by 10 deg on a larger gray monitor background. The noise images were altered by averaging the colors into 0.25 deg blocks or filtering with the ‘David Mills’ impressionism MATLAB function. For each of three test images we then generated a set of 100 blends that varied from the original noise to fully pixelated. Six observers adjusted the blend level using a staircase procedure until the pixilation was noticeable, either before or after adapting to a rapid succession of either the blocked or impressionist images that were randomly resampled every 0.2 sec for 180 sec. Thresholds for detecting the stylization increased by roughly 35% after adaptation – a difference that was significant for all images from both texture types - showing that adaptation reduced sensitivity to the manipulated textures. In a second experiment, the blocked and impressionist images were blended in 100 steps, and a staircase was used to estimate the boundary for classifying the style. Adaptation shifted the boundaries toward the adapting style consistent with a selective sensitivity loss for the style. These results are consistent with other studies demonstrating adaptation to visual texture or to image noise, and suggest that artists might perceive their works in unique ways because they may be uniquely adapted to them. Supported by EY-010834