I’m wondering if there’s a name for this so I can read more about it.
A small child looking out the windshield of a car while sitting from the back seat will have a view something like this:
I have heard kids indicate that based on this view, the car must be taking up the entire road.
Similarly, they may ask why far-off planes are so small or flying so slow.
If standing next to you, they may assume you can see what they see even if your view is occluded. E.g. someone in the passenger seat of a car that’s following a truck can see farther ahead on the passenger side than the driver can.
I think most people eventually get it, but is there a name for this understanding (or not understanding, especially if it persists in adults)?
I recall some article on childhood development talking about toddlers trying to sit on toy chairs or drawings of chairs. Maybe it’s related?
You want to read up on Visual Perception Development. Supposedly kids develop the abilities up until age 10, and it can include not understanding perspective and other spatial relationships, recognizing patterns, discriminating between similar shapes, remember the shape of something they’ve seen but not currently in view, etc. A cousin of mine had issues with it when we were kids.
I’m actually questioning my own post about timing of development - based on that most babies wave facing out by around nine months. Only some do the wave facing themselves. The latter is how it looks seeing others doing it, the former is imitating not what is seen from their own perspective but taking the perspective of others waving at them.
Of course the wave could be formed not by imitation but based exclusively on reinforcement of a random behavior, so maybe not.
I remember wondering, as a child, how the driver knew to stay within the lines, since from the driver’s perspective the car looked wider than the lane it was in, and if was off-center.
(And possibly vice versa.) Yes, my much-shorter SO and I occasionally notice things that the other does not.
Of course, all tall adults were short once; but that doesn’t mean we remember it.
I do remember that, throughout my childhood, it didn’t feel like my own height and that of my age-mates changed. We were always just “normal height,” while the adults and big kids were tall, and the little kids were short.
I seem to remember anthropologist Colin Turnbull writing about a time when a pygmy left the jungle for the first time in his life and saw an animal on the savannah a long distance away. The pygmy marveled at how small the animal was. Having lived his entire life in a dense jungle environment where one could scarcely see a few feet away through vegetation, the concept of perspective at any appreciable scale had never had an opportunity to develop.
I remember, when little, thinking things moved so fast. I watched an Audi commercial when little and was cringing at how fast the car was driving, it was like a roller coaster moving at warp speed, like crash was imminent.
Many years later, I realized the car in that commercial was actually going pretty slowly.
I remembered hearing this as well, and was going to post it here. On the other side of the coin, I had an art professor in College who said when he was teaching us perspective, that he had an advantage in this respect growing up in Kansas-- with all the wide-open flat space he had plenty of opportunity to ‘grok’ the concept of perspective from an early age.
many pre-Renaissance paintings have distorted perspective, because though they knew something was going on perspective-wise, and they attampted to paint what they saw, they didn’t understand the scientific principle of parallel lines diverging to a single point yet. So you’d get skewed views like these- especially evident in the angle of the baseboard vs. the headboard of the bed in this painting, yow..
Plus - we’ve been spoiled since renaissance artists figured out the rules of perspective, and even more spoiled since photographs came along - we expect art to be realistic, unless our watches start melting. Realism is what we expect.
For earlier art, often different rules with different reasoning applied. The medieval art where people and objects didn’t fit - the rule tended to be that the more important subjects of the painting were larger - hence Jesus would be bigger, maybe twice as big as the apostles, and the crowd in the background tinier still.
Egyptian depictions of people tend to look awkward, since the more common “walk like an Egyptian” pose showed the legs from the side view - the feet were more obviously feet - but often the torso from the front view since that showed to more common view and both arms; and the head turned sideways again since the profile was more distinct a view.
Similarly, cartoons and other less realistic art tend to exaggerate the size of the head, since th head and face are the most recognizable and individually distinctive part of anatomy. (To the point where in a strip like Peanuts it is highly exaggerated.) But - we don’t even notice that because it’s a stylistic metaphor we accept automatically.
As for the OP - in art, children ignore perspective because they too seem to assign objects size by importance - the parents are as big as the house in the finger painting so that they all fit on the paper and are big enough to be recognizable. (For various levels of “recognizable”)
Off topic but was it really that before then no one could figure the rules out? Or was it more that making it look like the real world as seen from a single fixed viewer perspective was not the point of the representation?
Art before those rules were “figured out” contained more information than that seen from a single viewer perspective.
Children’s art that shows people and objects relative to their importance to the child’s mind is showing a more interesting perspective than one with accurate vanishing points to my viewing anyway!
“Illusion of reality” painting techniques were apparently known as far back as ancient Greece, but usage seems to have been confined to theatrical backdrops (which makes sense). As best we can tell, the techniques were haphazard and produced an approximation of perspective views. Proper mathematical linear perspective was first developed in the 1480s or thereabout.
Before that, it simply wasn’t a priority to paint “realistically” the way we think of it. Realism doesn’t tell a story, and the majority of the art in the West was about storytelling, either historical or religious. What a thing or a person or a place “actually” looked like was not significant; what mattered was what happened, who did what to whom and why. That information is communicated much more readily and effectively when the art is highly stylized.
And even now, a lot of art still has distorted perspective, because a lot of people think that perspective can be portrayed by parallel lines converging on a single point.
(hint, it can’t, for the same reason that you can’t make an undistorted flat map of the world)
As I mentioned, part of it was about the lack of a deep desire to portray reality exactly.
The other part was, that the prosperity of the renaissance allowed a larger and better trained collective of artists who helped educate each other and build on what they learned. There was a demand for the best art and the money to pay good artists an excellent wage, and opportunities for a large number of them.
Not just perspective - they were interested in learning anatomy, for example, tl better understand the depictions of muscles with poses. There was more of an emphasis on getting body proportions just right (something the Greeks also did centuries BC).
Similarly, they studied lighting, and how it affected mood, put emphasis on certain subjects, etc.
As each artist or school figured out a piece of the puzzle with perspective, they taught the next crop of artists - soon everyone understood the principles. They went from “close, but still doesn’t look right” to very accurate perspective based on proper geometry.
The point is, though, that since renaissance artists “converted” the world to a realistic viewpoint for artistic depictions, we tend to usually see other depictions as “not right”.
