Conscious Awareness of Objects in Indeterminate Art

Indeterminate art invokes a perceptual dilemma in which apparently detailed and vivid images resist identification. We used event-related fMRI to study visual perception of representational, indeterminate and abstract paintings, and hypothesized increased activation along a gradient of posterior-to-anterior ventral visual areas with increased object resolution. We further predicted that indeterminate, ambiguous paintings would invoke visual imagery-related activation in parietal and prefrontal cortices.