When Scenes Look Like Materials: René Magritte’s Reversible Figure–Ground Motif

We draw attention to a frequent motif in the work of the Belgian surrealist René Magritte (1898–1967). In the motif, a scene is depicted that contains a silhouette, which itself contains another depicted scene. The silhouette is bistable, appearing either as a figural region whose positive space is covered, or filled, with the interior scene texture, or as a ground region providing a window onto a more distant scene. We call this the ‘reversible figure–ground motif’. Because the stimulus does not change when our percept changes, the motif’s appearance at any particular moment cannot be explained by its local or global image statistics. Instead principles of perceptual organization, and in particular image segmentation and figure–ground assignment, appear crucial for determining whether the interior of the silhouette is processed as a material vs. a scene — which in turn reflects the fundamental role of visual segmentation in material and scene perception more generally.