Hue Contrast and the Sense of Space

Does human vision deploy a generic template for open landscapes that might fit the gist of current optical input? In an experiment, participants judged depth order in split-field images in which the two fuzzily delineated half-images were filled with different hues. For the majority of observers, we find a systematic dependence of depth order of these half-images on their hue and/or brightness difference. After minor cleaning of the data, we are left with two mutually well-separated clusters. Correlation with the statistical distribution of hue and brightness in generic “open landscape” photographs reveals that one cluster correlates with hue, the other with brightness. This suggests that human observers indeed at least partly rely on “generic landscape” templates in the psychogenesis of their visual awareness.