Components of artistic style: turning people into pigeons

Abstract

Family resemblance describes the covarying information across members of a category. In an attempt to demonstrate human categorization based on family resemblance| that is, on the style of a category, it seems that categorical definition must be made an incidental part of the task so that participants employ a strategy described by Brooks (1978) as "nonanalytic cognition". Eigenvectors obtained from the dimension reduction of pixel-maps describe the underlying structural variation across a set of images. Partially reconstructed images made from a subset of their derived eigenvectors were used as stimuli in investigating judgements of style, as they appear to be without human-nameable features. The following exploratory experiments provide evidence for spontaneous judgements based on family resemblance using as little information as is contained in the first 10 eigenvectors of Monet and Picasso paintings.