I have a background in Cognitive Psychology (M.A.) and it occurred to me that candid photography–whether it be street photography or candid event photography–is in fact an act of “signal detection”.

For those unfamiliar with signal detection theory, here’s a simple description from a Hanover College Psychology web page:

A person is faced with a stimulus that is very faint or confusing.  For simplicity’s sake lets us call this stimulus a signal.  The person must make a decision, is the signal there or not.  What makes this situation confusing and difficult is the presences of other mess that is similar to the signal.  Let us call this mess noise.

What makes this different from traditional threshold theories is that the subject makes a decision, a cognitive act, as to whether the signal is present or not.  This basic sensory act of determining if a stimulus occurred now is understood to have a cognitive component.

As a photographer, the signal you are trying to detect is “a good and/or interesting photograph”. However, there are usually lots of visual stimuli available in the immediate surroundings (i.e., “noise” or “mess”), and successfully identifying a “signal” (in our case, a good or interesting photograph) in this “mess” of stimuli often requires an experienced and/or trained eye.

Not only do you have the photographer’s training and experience to consider, but there’s also the situation itself.

In my experience, situations can vary greatly in terms of signal. At an event like a fashion show, festival, or parade there’s commonly a lot of “signal” available–i.e., many good or interesting photo possibilities present. In other situations, you may find it difficult to find *any* signal/good photos due to poor lighting, plain surrounds, lack of activity, etc.

One of the biggest challenges for a professional photographer is to find whatever “signal” is available regardless of the situation and the presence of distracting or misleading stimuli that are mere “noise”. Sometimes, this requires quite of bit of imagination and creative visualization.

One of my most satisfying experiences as a photographer is finding or detecting “signal” where others see only “noise”.

Maybe psychology is in fact a great background for a photographer…;p.

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