[Click here to see the flag](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Scotland#/media/File:Flag_of_Scotland.svg)
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You see the flag of England as white rectangles?
Triangles are relatively uncommon in nature. Stripes and straight things are very common. Your brain is picking this up as white on blue because it’s most likely that the white straight things are on top of a blue base.
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Because every national flag we see is a rectangle with stuff inside it and our brain interprets every national flag in that category.
This is called the figure-ground relationship.
“it is known as identifying a figure from the background. For example, black words on a printed paper are seen as the “figure”, and the white sheet as the “background.”
“How does the brain decide in a visual scene which item is the figure and which are part of the ground? This perceptual decision can be based on many cues, all of which are of a probabilistic nature.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figure–ground_(perception)
Well the white stripes is the center point and that’s where our brains focus on naturally. Our eyes and brain processing of the image is very lazy. We just look at an image and quickly identify it as quickly as possible and move on.
The blue on Scotland’s flag and the white on England’s take up the majority of space so we assume the whole flag are those colours and the white on Scotland’s flag and red on England’s are exactly as we see them which are stripes.
I have no idea what causes us to do this but we’ll always see what makes the most sense.
I don’t feel I see either strips or triangles but rather the whole flag as one unit. If I concentrate I can sort of separate them out like you talk about but that is not my first instinct. Is that not the norm? I do on other pictures where it’s clear there is negative space but with this flag it’s pretty even.
It is designed that way – the white is a saltire which is a cross (as in yes a crucifixion symbol) on a blue field. Our eyes are accustomed to seeing the blue sky or blue seas as background.
This doesn’t work as well with the Union Jack (which is an amalgamation of the St George’s cross for England, St Andrew’s saltire for Scotland and St Patrick’s saltire for Ireland) because the blue bits are crowded out – in absence of other information our brain would assume the dominant periphery color to be background.
One of the things is that it’s a flag. After being exposed to flag for even a short amount of time you consider the rectangle of the flag a ‘field’. A field upon which designed are layed.
Another reason (for this flag at least) is our brain automatically thinks of blue tones as further away. Mountains a few miles away may appear blue, violet or such cool hues due to atmospheric particles reflecting the color of the blue sky. Even further away is the blue sky itself.
In the art term: “Blue Recedes”.
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