The psychophysics of style.

Among the most significant modes of human creative expression is style: the capacity to represent objects, events and scenes (for example, lilies dotting a pond) in some distinctive manner (for example, Monet's broken brushstrokes and blended colours). Diverse research traditions analyse the social, political and aesthetic significance of stylistic representation. But what are the cognitive and computational foundations of this capacity? Here we characterize style perception as a process that 'parses' form from content, and adapt classic psychophysical paradigms to discover multiple new phenomena of style perception. Using both naturalistic images and synthetic stimuli, ten experiments reveal perceptual 'tuning' to stylistic information, representational constancy over stylistic variation, and mental rendering of novel styled objects. Moreover, an object recognition model further grounds style perception by capturing human judgements of image similarity over different styles. Together, this work illuminates the psychological foundations of stylistic perception and opens the door to further investigation of styled media.