By use of a long series of examples from the history of visual art (paintings), Solso explained how we understand art in terms of the cognitive processing involved. Working within the information-processing paradigm, he described understanding as a series of sequential stages from physical light hitting the retina, transduction into neuronal impulses, visual cortex processing, and associative cortex processing.
He showed how eye movement when looking at a painting is directed by the person's motivations and intentions. He argued that many paintings have been made so as to make a viewer's eye movements follow the lines of geometrical figures, for instance, triangles.
How visual art has looked during its history was said to depend partly on aspects of how the perceptual-cognitive apparatus is design, and partly on cultural conventions.
He presented a statement on how to best view art: increased knowledge of the history
and other kinds of context surrounding a piece of art, leads to better appreciation
of it.
Personal reflections