Looking at the way we see and recognize images I came across an interesting text about the mechanisms of recognition. The paragraph comes from a book titled The Image and the Eye by E. H. Gombrich:
Recognition is easy, it is almost automatic, but, perhaps because of its automatic quality, largely unconscious. Not unconscious, to be sure, in the Freudian sense, but in the sense of those automatic processes to which we need not and often cannot attend. We do not know how and why we recognize a correctly drawn cow, but we soon notice if something is amiss in a real or pictured cow.
[...] the difficulties portrait painters so often experience. Troublesome relatives of their sitters will insist that there is still something around the mouth that is not right, that they still cannot quite recognize Uncle Jimmy. Yet they are rarely willing or able to say why the mouth looks wrong to them. [...] I tend to believe that the relatives probably knew what they were talking about. It is genuinely disturbing to feel an element of strangeness unsettling a familiar sight. We tend to notice at once if something in our room has been shifted, though few of us could ever recall, let alone draw, the content of our rooms.
While we all know this in a way, having it explained explicitly made me consciously aware of this pattern of recognition (or am I just rephrasing what Gombrich wrote and relating it to our learning and understanding?).
To relate it to a specific image/space, I felt a similar confusion a few year ago when I got pictures from my holiday in Iceland developed. I looked at one of the images and there was a problem with
it. The clouds were rightly on top of the image and it all seemed fine and yet the picture did not work. It took me a while of turning it around and looking at it from all points before I realized it was actually upside down! The clouds as seen above the landscape are actually a perfect reflection of sky in the water, deceitful enough to confuse me - and I was the one who took the picture.
Back to the topic, as soon as I saw the picture, I knew it was wrong and it took me relatively long to figure it out.
This must be then what the automatic recognition does - it makes you immediately aware of things even slightly out of sync and forces you to stop and look again. Interestingly, this way we get to see plenty of things we would have otherwise passed by. Therefore a good design (or film) might have an unexpected or slightly our of ordinary element to it to get the viewer to remember it.