Mindscape Colors

Andrea van Doorn, Jan Koenderink, Johan Wagemans

University of Leuven (KU Leuven) & Utrecht University
left a painting by Hans Thoma
(1890, Landscape at Taunus)

right a famous photograph by

Andreas Gursky Rhein II

an average of many photographs by

Jason Salavon 112 houses for sale,
MiamiDade county 2002

a data base of 144 photographs of

an open landscape

An analysis of the average Open Landscape

reveals the same chromatic and tonal ordering as
in the pictures above

Is it an ecological invariant?

There is reason to believe that an ecological
invariant exists for purely optical reasons.
Here we analyze the generic savannah environment,
the type of environment in which our ancestors
evolved.
The causes of the color ordering are of various kinds.
Important generic facts are that the sun and sky are
above, the earth below and horizontally extended,
covered with sparse vegetation.
The optical effects are of three kinds, namely the direct
illumination by the sun, the airlight (atmospheric
perspective), and the perspective effects.
Distance correlates with height in the visual field,
amount of airlight, and fraction of occluded soil (the
grass is greener at the other side of the fence).
Combined, we obtain the chromatic and tonal order
noticed in our analysis.

Observers judged which of

the two parts of a split square
was nearest to them.

All pairwise combinations of

twelve hues occurred equally.

Each color combination occurs equally often in all orientations. A catch trial

From the pairwise comparisons we derive a unique nearness

order of colors

The effect is significant, and not masked by the expected

fact that there is a clear preference to judge lower as nearer.

We find two major clusters of observers with mutually

different responses.

For a major group (cluster I) we obtain a clean correlation of

hue with nearness in the ecological range yellow to blue.
For this group there is no obvious effect of brightness.

For cluster II the hue is not correlated with nearness, but

there is a significant correlation of nearness with brightness.

These hues were sampled

from the empirical
distribution for cluster I

These brightnesses were

sampled from the empirical
distribution for cluster II