What makes a miniature hold together when the parts all seem correct?

In this episode of Her Shrink Ray Eye, I look at miniatures as controlled illusions: not illusion as a trick, but as a system of cues that guides what the viewer sees, infers, trusts, and completes. A miniature does not have to explain everything. It has to give the viewer enough stable evidence to keep looking. Scale, surface, light, placement, omission, edges, and visual grouping all affect whether the piece holds together or begins to fall apart. This episode draws on ideas from predictive processing, scene perception, amodal completion, scale perception, cue integration, spatial cognition, Gestalt grouping, geography, and E. H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion.

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