Sun, Jennifer and Perona, Pietro (1998) Where is the sun? Nature Neuroscience, 1 (3). pp. 183-184. ISSN 1097-6256. doi:10.1038/630. https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20140730-101723189
Full text is not posted in this repository. Consult Related URLs below.
Use this Persistent URL to link to this item: https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20140730-101723189
Abstract
When we interpret a shaded picture as a three-dimensional (3D) scene, our visual system often needs to guess the position of the light source in order to resolve a convex-concave ambiguity. For more than a century, psychologists have known that the visual system assumes that light comes from above and have argued that this assumption is ecologically justified because our everyday light source (the sun) is overhead. Our experiments reveal that people's preferred lighting direction is not directly overhead, but rather shifted to the left, and this preference is reflected in art spanning two millennia. Furthermore, we find a strong correlation between people's handedness and their preferred lighting. We suggest that what counts is not so much where the sun is, but where you like the sun to be.
Item Type: | Article | |||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Related URLs: |
| |||||||||
ORCID: |
| |||||||||
Additional Information: | ©1998 Nature America. The authors are grateful to Dr. Marianne Tauber for providing the references to the Gestalt literature. Support was provided by the NSF Engineering Reasearch Center for Neuromorphic Systems at Caltech. | |||||||||
Funders: |
| |||||||||
Subject Keywords: | Psychophysics | |||||||||
Series Name: | Scientific Correspondence | |||||||||
Issue or Number: | 3 | |||||||||
DOI: | 10.1038/630 | |||||||||
Record Number: | CaltechAUTHORS:20140730-101723189 | |||||||||
Persistent URL: | https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20140730-101723189 | |||||||||
Usage Policy: | No commercial reproduction, distribution, display or performance rights in this work are provided. | |||||||||
ID Code: | 47645 | |||||||||
Collection: | CaltechAUTHORS | |||||||||
Deposited By: | Caroline Murphy | |||||||||
Deposited On: | 04 Aug 2014 20:42 | |||||||||
Last Modified: | 10 Nov 2021 17:48 |
Repository Staff Only: item control page