Gericault’s Fake-Gallop Horse Judged Speedy but Unrealistic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In two experiments, we tested pictures of horse gaits— alt (standing), walk, trot, gallop, and a fake gallop, a pose shown in a well-known Gericault painting. The pose was portrayed frequently in the nineteenth century, its features hotly debated. Fake gallop has legs extended fore and rear, close to parallel to the ground. Experiment 1 sampled real artworks depicting horses and Experiment 2 used silhouettes of horses. In both, reports of amount of movement increased from alt to fake gallop. In Experiment 1 similar results were obtained from novices and equestrians (‘experts’ familiar with horses). The extreme leg extension in fake gallop may suggest high speed, as Arnheim suggested. However, true gallop includes legs curled close together under the body—a ‘running pony’ pose—so both extremes of extension may suggest high speed. In Experiment 2, novices judged fake gallop unrealistic despite giving high movement scores. We suggest its depiction may be metaphoric, meaning a deliberately false item has relevant features of a referent. For the artworks, the amount of movement reported correlated positively but quite modestly with aesthetic appreciation, but for the silhouettes, the correlation was reversed. We suggest expression can be positive for many horse poses.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".