Photo and words by kevindooley on Flickr

New research shows that when people look at objects in the world, they only visually take in, on average, 20% of the “visual information content” the object provides. Imagine your mom just peaking her head around the corner; we might only see a few hairs, and yet we can visually fill in the rest of the image hiding behind the wall. We might even visualize from that little information both her stance and movement. This “filling in” occurs via our memory, and our mental models (i.e. our gestalt, or worldview).

Photography further reduces visual information by collapsing 3d, or 4d, into 2d. And then we can do yet more to the image which reduces or at least distorts the visual information.

Thus, the perception of the image above is as much up to you as it is me!

This image was taken by aiming my Canon Powershot G7 into (or through) the viewfinder (TtV) of an old vintage camera, in this case a 1936 Kodak Brownie 616. There’s not much visual information to go on here; lots of distortion and noise.

I bet though as soon as you saw the image, your mind did a lot of “filling out”. So what memories and emotions were evoked when you “filled out” this image?

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