Not surprisingly, we’re finding that people are reasonably consistent in grouping together pictures which see they perceive as ‘being similar’. However, there does seem to be a marked gender difference operating. Women have a tendency to group together pictures on the basis of similarity of colour and subject even if they have dissimilar visual structure or style (see example below).
Men, on the other hand, seem more inclined to group together pictures which share similar visual structure or style even if their colours or subject matter are very different (see example below).
And what about pigeons? We couldn't persuade any to do our experiment but they've certainly been shown to be capable of discriminating between Monet and Picasso and, once trained, can carry over this discrimination to new paintings by these two artists. Apparently, they can also generalise the behaviour to other impressionist and cubist works[1]. Impressive performance but were these arty pigeons male or female? It leaves us wondering....!!
I'll come back to this subject when I've discovered some more.....
Meanwhile, you can read a fascinating article about birds and colour vision here.
And one about possible gender differences in colour perception here.
[1] Wannabe, S., Sakamoto, J. and Watika, M. (1995), Pigeons’ discrimination of paintings by Monet and Picasso, Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behaviour, 63, 165=174.
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