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After the class with Paul Grobstein the other day I was left wondering if our brains locate and give meaning to randomness does context affect the meaning we perceive?  I used the images below to test this.

Picture 1

Picture 2

There are two images hidden in each picture.  The middle color block can be seen as a goblet/candlestick/vase and the outer color block can be seen as two profile faces. 

I gave half of my participants Picture 1 and half Picture 2 and asked the following questions:

1) Look at the figure below for 1 second (basically aglance).

2) What do you see?

3) Look at the figure below again for 10 seconds.

4) What do you see?

I was hoping to see that the background (the context) would affect a person's ability to see both images.  I hypothesized that more people would be able to see both  images in Picture 2 because the outer blue border calls more attention to there being two images, whereas in Picture 1 the image of the profile faces is lost into the white of the background.

However, I found that the background didn't actually made a difference.  Of the twelve people that I surveyed (six with each picture) all six people saw both images in Picture 1 and five people saw both images in Picture 2.  (Interestingly, the person who did not see both images in Picture 2 only saw the goblet/candlestick/vase image.)  While this information does support my hypothesis, five of the six still saw both images.  So, from my results I would say that context does not affect the meaning perceived from an image.

However, that being said, my sample size was excessively small and many of the people who I surveyed had already seen this picture before in some form or another and already knew about the two images, which most likely greatly affected my results.  I would like to repeat this on a larger scale and with a similar, yet lesser known picture.