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Prior to the discovery of linear perspective in the fifteenth century, European artists based their compositions more on imagination than the direct observation of nature. Medieval paintings, therefore, can be thought of as ‘mental projections’ of space rather than optical projections, and were sometimes regarded as ‘primitive’ by historians as they lacked the spatial consistency of later works based on the rules of linear perspective.

The article discusses the field of "picturistics" and the challenges in understanding the nature of pictures and picture perception. It highlights the complexity of depicting space and the different types of space involved in the visual experience. The lack of a general theory of pictures is attributed to the multidisciplinary knowledge required and the dominance of linear perspective in representing visual space. The article also explores the paradoxical nature of pictures, which are both flat and deep, and emphasizes the importance of the artistic perspective in understanding picture perception. The paper suggests that an integrated approach combining art, philosophy, and science could pave the way for a future discipline of picturistics. [Extracted from the article]

I consider predictive processing (PP) from the perspective of an artist who also conducts scientific research into art and perception. This paper presents artworks I have made and statements from other artists that exemplify some of PP's core principles. But it also raises questions about the extent to which current applications of PP theory provide a comprehensive account of art experience. Prediction error minimization, a key mechanism of PP, has been proposed as a cause of positive aesthetic affect because artworks offer opportunities for reward through disambiguation and learning. However, there are many cases where prediction errors proliferate in art experiences in a way that enhances aesthetic affect. Here I suggest the inability of our perceptual systems to minimize prediction errors when beholding certain artworks can evoke heightened states of fascination and exhilaration. Moreover, powerful artworks provide opportunities for maximizing prediction errors, within certain bounds, by evoking states of paradox, contradiction and illogicality. I conclude that beholding such artworks can intensify our sense of being by making us more alive to the world. This article is part of the theme issue 'Art, aesthetics and predictive processing: theoretical and empirical perspectives'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite its mathematical simplicity and ubiquity in imaging technology, there has long been doubt about the ability of linear perspective to best represent human visual space, especially at wide-angle fields of view under natural viewing conditions. We investigated whether changes to image geometry had an impact on participants' performance, specifically in terms of non-metric distance estimates. Our multidisciplinary research team developed a new open-source image database to study distance perception in images by systematically manipulating target distance, field of view, and image projection using non-linear natural perspective projections. The database consists of 12 outdoor scenes of a virtual three-dimensional urban environment in which a target ball is presented at increasing distance, visualised using both linear perspective and natural perspective images, rendered, respectively, with three different fields of view: 100°, 120°, and 140° horizontally. In the first experiment (N = 52), we tested the effects of linear versus natural perspective on non-metric distance judgements. In the second experiment (N = 195), we investigated the influence of contextual and previous familiarity with linear perspective, and individual differences in spatial skills on distance estimations. The results of both experiments showed that distance estimation accuracy improved in natural compared with linear perspective images, particularly at wide-angle fields of view. Moreover, undertaking a training session with only natural perspective images led to more accurate distance judgements overall. We argue that the efficacy of natural perspective may stem from its resemblance to the way objects appear under natural viewing conditions, and that this can provide insights into the phenomenological structure of visual space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]