What the Neuroscience of Decision-Making Teaches Us About Taking Better Pictures
Across three guest posts, Dr. Brockett focuses on the ways in which the neuroscience of visual perception impacts our appreciation of photography. These pieces help uncover how the brain sees an image, what it detects, and ultimately how to utilize the neuroscience of perception to take better photos. In the first piece, he discussed the similarities and differences between eyes and cameras. Post 2 examined how our brains make sense of what we see. Finally, here in post 3, Dr. Brockett talks about the neuroscience of decision-making, and how an understanding of the visual environment, influences what we take a picture of in the first place.
Consider these two photos taken minutes apart at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, DC. On the left, you have a wide-angle image that emphasizes light pouring in under the massive dome high above the statue of Thomas Jefferson. On the right, you’re invited to consider the statue itself and its interaction with the light and the text from the Declaration of Independence on the back wall. The one on the left required me to lay on my back in between tour groups coming and going to get as much of the dome in the frame as possible, while the one on the right required me to stand like a normal person and just wait for two people to move out of the scene.
As you can see, both photos provide different perspectives on the same scene. What drew me into the memorial in the first place was the contrast of the early morning light pouring into the memorial being broken up by the columns. Already we know that our visual system has a penchant for contrast, so as soon as I saw this, I put the camera to my eye and started composing a shot.
These two photos also highlight two distinct experiences, one of me laying on the floor trying to get the shot, and the other, a more mundane experience, of me just standing upright taking a photo. How does this impact my perception of these photos? Subjectively speaking, the image on the left felt more creative and required a little more effort. It also offered a perspective less commonly seen, which as a person who takes a lot of photos of DC, just felt more interesting. While this is by no means an empirical study, these examples show that my decision-making was driven by the combination of the contrast of the light and my experience of a newish perspective.
While I would like to think that my reasons for taking all my photos are normally as clear-cut as the ones in this example, I know that is far from the case. Even as a neuroscientist who studies decision-making, the truth is that I do not really have a good idea about what makes me take the pictures I do, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. In preparation for this article, I asked a few photographer friends to describe what makes them take the photos they take. They all emphasized the importance of capturing an experience, but in the end, could only really offer some variant of ‘[it] should just look good.’
Despite all we know about visual processing in the brain, it is extremely difficult to think about the importance of color, contrast, and composition, while simultaneously trying to experience a scene and operate a camera. Despite this truth, photographers everywhere seem to routinely be able to capture beautiful photographs on a near-daily basis. So what are their brains thinking about?
A Photographer’s Decision-Making Process
Thanks to the camera manufacturer Canon, we know that photographers of different experience levels approach potential scenes/photographs differently. In a stroke of marketing genius, Canon invited three people, a non-photographer, a student photographer, and a professional photographer to participate in what they called the ‘Obsession Experiment’ (Canon USA, 2015). The goal of the ‘experiment’ was to have all three participants view the same image that just happened to be printed on, at the time, a newly released Canon printer. Canon recorded each person’s reactions to the print as they marveled at the detail and color…this was a printer ad after all.
At the same time, the marketing wizards at Canon also tracked the eye movements each participant made while looking at the print. Canon showed that while the non-photographer made approximately 200 eye movements in assessing the image, the professional photographer made closer to 1200 eye movements in the same amount of time. The student photographer was somewhere in the middle, suggesting that a photographer’s experience greatly impacts the way they approach a visual scene. Of course, it seems obvious that someone who makes a living making images looks at images slightly differently than someone who doesn’t, and the other flaws in this ‘experiment’ are expertly detailed by Peta-Pixel (Sawh, Kishore, 2015). Nevertheless, Canon’s marketing effort does provide a compelling illustration of how photographers think about the visual world differently. But how does this work in our brains?
We know from research that the brain can react to a visual stimulus extremely quickly. For instance, when participants are instructed to press a key as quickly as they can to a red dot appearing on a screen, researchers have found that in healthy adults, the brain takes approximately 200ms to react to a visual stimulus (Jain et al., 2015). For perspective, this means that an eager photographer can theoretically process a visual scene and move to click the shutter button in as little as 1/5th of a second.
Back to the ‘Obsession Experiment’ - while the descriptions each person gave about the image are far from perfect measures, it is clear while watching the ad, as the eye-tracking data would suggest, the professional photographer is far more nuanced in his descriptions of the points of contrast, the color, detail, and how these factors work together in the image compared to the non-photographer. However, even without photography credentials, both the non-photographer and the professional photographer zero in on how these low-level features contribute to their experience as a whole. So, how do we understand the overall quality of a photo, or in other words how does a photographer’s brain determine whether an image is good?
Photography and Neuroscience / Figure adapted from (Ishizu & Zeki, 2011)
Perception of Beauty in the Brain
A pioneering neuroscientist in the field of neuro-aesthetics, Semir Zeki, has attempted to answer this question by asking what happens to the brain of a person viewing an image (Zeki, 1998). Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a tool that measures brain activity, Zeki and colleagues have shown that an area in the frontal half of our brains, known as the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC), is preferentially activated (i.e., the yellow dots in the figure) when participants viewed images they said were beautiful compared to when they viewed images they said were ugly (Figure A), when stimuli sounded beautiful versus ugly (Figure B) and when vision and sound trials were combined (Figure C) (Ishizu & Zeki, 2011).
Increases in activity were unique to the individual viewing the image, suggesting that these neural signals may be reflective of an individual’s perception of the image as a whole rather than a specific feature of the image. Importantly, these findings are correlational, and the authors are unable to conclude that viewing something beautiful causes mOFC activation, just that they are related. Another study also implicated the mOFC, as well as a second brain area known as the amygdala, in being important for a participant’s feelings of enjoyment of an image and the sense of visual harmony conveyed (Ikeda et al., 2015). The findings suggest that these brain areas are primarily interested in what an image looks like as a whole rather than just its individual features such as color or contrast. In other words, the frontal areas of our brain appear to combine all of the lower-level details carefully detected by our visual system (see Post 2) as well as information about the experience more generally in order to help us understand the image as a whole.
In support of this idea, it is worth noting that the frontal areas of our brains that appear to be involved in the abstract processing of a photograph and beauty are also the same brain areas that have been shown to be important in deciding whether a reward is good or not, as well as for guiding our attention, decision-making, and learning and memory more generally (Brockett et al., 2021; Brockett & Roesch, 2020).
The Neuroscience and Psychology Behind the Mind of a Photographer
In the end, it may be beyond the reach of neuroscience and psychology to know completely what goes on in the mind of a photographer. What is clear is that photographers must rely on their eyes to collect as much information as possible about a visual scene. They must rely on their visual system to quickly process and make sense of all this information.
Finally, they must rely on areas in the frontal regions of their brains to put all of this information together and to respond to the right scene at the right time. Along the way, we have seen how light collected on photoreceptors on the retina is made sense of in terms of color, contrast, and ultimately visual harmony. The challenge for neuroscientists is to fill in the remaining gaps regarding how this processing occurs across the brain. The challenge for photographers, now armed with a little bit of neuroscience, is to figure out how to take better photos.
What we know now is that images that play in the space between what we experience and what we remember experiencing are the ones most likely to garner likes, build engagement, and ultimately make people think. Regardless of whether you are trying to build a brand or simply make great art, the secret to making great photographs lies in becoming more in tune with how your brain works.
Photo by Donny Jiang via UnSplash
About the author
Dr. Adam Brockett is an NRSA funded post-doctoral fellow working in the lab of Dr. Matthew Roesch at the University of Maryland, College Park. Prior to joining the Roesch Lab, Adam received his PhD in Psychology and Neuroscience from Princeton University under the mentorship of Professor Elizabeth Gould. Adam’s research explores the intersection of experience and behavior, primarily focusing on how neurons and glia in the frontal areas of our brain support decision-making across the lifespan, and what happens when these processes go awry. When not in the lab, Adam works as a freelance photographer in the DC area, amassing over 11,000 followers on his Instagram. Adam specializes mostly in landscape and architectural photography and has had work featured by Southern Living, The Washington Post, and Delaware Today.
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