Dear Chuck,

        >I doubt that anything that makes it into consciousness is
uninterpreted - i.e. has not referenced knowledge from prior experience.
The recognition of difference begins early in infancy and quickly
becomes semantic as it recognizes patterns (faces for example) that
begin to acquire culturally useful meanings.  

You do make sense, but I had grounded my assumptions on Arnheim:

"If it could be shown in the laboratory that a well-organized line
figure imposes itself upon all observers as basically the same shape,
regardless of the associations and fantasies it stirs up in some of them
because of their cultural background and individual disposition, one
could expect the same, at least in principle, with respect to people
looking at works of art." (Arnheim, 1974: 6) 

> What is your definition of basic level visualization? 

You're right, I had relied more on the Gestalt psychologists (thanks for
Marr and Kosslyn). I referred to the initial visual stimuli, where there
is identification and recognition of the object. Granted that every
object has meaning, but I am trying to design the experiment so that no
meanings are drawn on for the judgment of similarity. I hope to get the
tester to classify forms, grouping the most similar. 

I take it from your post that you believe it to be impossible to isolate
semantics from this process, using visualization as a human benchmarking
tool? 

        >(and please let me know your results)

It will be a pleasure to send you the results. If you care to have a go
on the computer-based assessment tool, I'll include you as one of my
testers!

Best,

Daniela

        Arnheim, R. (1974) Art and Visual Perception. University of
California Press.

:: Daniela Büchler ::
PhD candidate
Faculty of Arts, Media & Design
Staffordshire University
Stoke on Trent
UK

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