An ongoing project of mine is researching the visual mechanisms whereby human beings recognise content in pictures.
In my thesis Depiction and Recognition I developed a philosophical account, based on the work of Flint Schier, which demonstrates that we recognise content in pictures because pictures trigger a subset of the natural recognition abilities which we use when we encounter objects, animals and people in real life.
It is clear that the reason we see objects, animals and people in drawings, paintings and photographs is because the artist or photographers who created these depictions intended that people with natural recognition abilities would be able to recognise these things.
My current project Recognition Triggers explores this idea from the perspective of the creator of the depictions and looks at how natural recognition triggers are built into pictures as they are created.