The syntax organization of shape and color and the laws of coloration in vision, art and biology

In this work we demonstrated that next to the figure-ground segregation and the perceptual grouping, as proposed by Gestalt psychologists, there is a further and more complex kind of organization related to the way object attributes like shape and color are organized to create a visual object. More particularly, through new logical and phenomenal implications, we explored the complexity of the phenomenal coloration and the syntactic relation between shape and color. Moreover, we extracted the main laws ruling their phenomenal logic and organization. Finally, we presented new conditions and a new paradigm based on the drawings and paintings made spontaneously by children of different ages in a drawing/ painting task. Through this paradigm, it was assumed that the way children organize shape and color in their drawings and paintings are related to the way the visual system perceives their syntactic relation. The results showed that, under the conditions studied, shape and color are organized as juxtaposed and in sequential order with the shape that becomes hierarchically the core reference for the color. The results suggest a visual syntactic organization as a new kind of object formation process useful to understand the language of vision and the implications for art and biology.