Lucia Ronchi's book The visual balance between globality and interactions is available via open access from Google Books from this link: http://books.google.com/books?id=HZDUqzJ7er8C.
This is the foreword:
This review on the current state of experimental visual research mainly concerns the response to complex test objects, involving the conjunction of several stimulus features, followed by the activation of various mechanisms, hierarchically located at different levels along the visual pathway. The prediction of the response is complicated by the underlying jungle of mutual interactions, as shown by the recent modelling. From the stand point of the laboratory experiment, the traditional response indexes need to be flanked by the so called «global" responses. A glance to the literature appeared during the past two decades reveals that this topic is not new, however is seems to us that it is yet at the specialized levels, and an educational simplification would be needed.
The present preliminary attempt along these lines is divided into two parts. First of all, our experimentation performed during the past eleven years is described, by using an assumed global index, the visual balance, per se not new, because it has been discussed as one of the ingredients of perceptual harmony during the past two centuries. In the second part, the plethora of concepts underlying the concept of balance and its visual process are summarized, after a glance to the more-or less recent visual literature.
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