Archaeologists often argue whether Paleolithic works of art, cave paintings in particular, constitute reflections of the natural environment of humans at the time. They also debate the extent to which these paintings actually contain creative artistic expression, reflect the phenotypic variation of the surrounding environment, or focus on rare phenotypes. The famous paintings "The Dappled Horse...

Ron Terada is a Vancouver-based artist who sometimes makes paintings (he is equally recognized for making sculptural installations and photo-based conceptual projects.) The “Jeopardy” series of paintings he executed in the years 1999–2000 have meticulously crafted coloured surfaces built up of many layers of pigment. Terada’s paintings are often referred to as “monochromes,” as if they were sin...

This article illustrates how the paintings of visual artists activate multiple brain processes that contribute to their conscious perception. Paintings of different artists may activate different combinations of brain processes to achieve their artist’s aesthetic goals. Neural models of how advanced brains see have characterized various of these processes. These models are used to explain how p...

Leaf yellowing or petal senescence is the main postharvest disorder for many cut flowers. Plant hormones such as cytokinins are able to inhibit leaf yellowing in some cut flowers and potted plants. In our experiments, we applied thidiazuron aiming to delay leaf yellowing and 1-methylciclopropene (1-MCP) for inhibiting flower senescence of cut stock flowers during vase life. Cut flowers were pul...

Electrophysiological recordings were made in 21 observers to investigate whether differences in signature components (P1, N1, selection negativity [SN]) would be revealed during perceptual reversals of three different multistable figures. Using a lattice of Necker cubes as a stimulus, J. Kornmeier and M. Bach (2004, 2005) reported differences in P1 amplitudes as well a broad reversal-related ne...

The respiration of cut flowers of rose (Rosa hybrida L. ‘First Red’) and gypsophila (Gypsophila paniculata L. ‘Bristol Fairy’) increased exponentially with increasing respiration, with a Q10 value between 0 and 10°C of 3 for both flowers. The vase life of the flowers was negatively affected by simulated transport at higher temperatures whereas dry storage for 5 days at 0°C resulted in a vase li...

Neuronal oscillations in the gamma band (above 30 Hz) have been proposed to be a possible mechanism for the visual representation of objects. The present study examined the topography of gamma band spectral power and event-related potentials in human EEG associated with perceptual switching effected by rotating ambiguous (bistable) figures. Eleven healthy human subjects were presented two rotat...

F ore-edge decorations on manuscripts date back to the 10th century. Decorations can be seen when the book is lying on its side, a custom of the 15th and 16th centuries, and should not be confused with fore-edge paintings. Fore-edge paintings are not visible when the book is closed, but when the leaves are slanted or fanned, a beautiful miniature landscape appears. Fore-edge paintings are usual...

We addressed the problem of automatically differentiating photographs of real scenes from photographs of paintings. We found that photographs differ from paintings in their color, edge, and texture properties. Based on these features, we trained and tested a classifier on a database of 6000 paintings and 6000 photographs. Using single features results in 70–80% correct discrimination performanc...