Events

Prof. Baingio Pinna

Prof. (Dr.) Baingio Pinna is a Full Professor of Experimental Psychology and Vision Science at the University of Sassari, Italy. He has a PhD in Experimental Psychology, Visual Perception, and Psychophysics from the University of Padua, Italy. He graduated summa cum laude with Bachelors’ degrees in two disciplines: Psychology and Computer Engineering. He also has a Master’s degree in Computer Engineering. Prof. Pinna has been a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Padua. His research interests lie in visual illusions; psychophysical investigation and experimental phenomenology of visual processes (spatial vision, motion perception, color vision, shape perception, perceptual meaning); perceptual organization; tourism Psychology; vision science and art; and visual design. Prof. Pinna has been awarded several fellowships and honors, including a Research Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, in Germany. In 2009, he won the Wolfgang Metzger Award, an international scientific award awarded to eminent people in gestalt science and research for their outstanding achievements. He sits on the editorial and advisory board of several journals and is Editor-in-Chief of Art and Perception.

Abstract:

The main purpose of this talk is to demonstrate that next to the figure-ground segregation and the perceptual grouping, as proposed by Gestalt psychologists, there is a further kind of organization related to how object attributes like shape and color are organized to create a visual object. Under the conditions here studied, shape and color are organized as juxtaposed and in sequential order with the shape that becomes hierarchically the core reference for the color. The results suggest a visual syntactic organization as a new kind of object formation process useful to understand the language of vision. The syntax of visual attributes can be defined as the arrangement of attributes (shape, color, etc.) to create well-formed phenomenal attribute organizations. The results have implications in terms of neural circuitry for theories concerning both segregation and binding of shape and color information.