The Art Institute of Chicago is home to one of the world's great collections of impressionist and postimpressionist paintings. Perhaps the most popular piece in their collection is Georges Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of la Grande Jatte. This magnificent painting takes up an entire wall of one main gallery. As you enter the gallery, you are immediately drawn into a fanciful park scene with couples in formal wear strolling with umbrellas in a wooded area by a shimmering lake. On the lake, sailboats, steamers, and a scull boat with crew glide by. Once you adjust to the sheer size of the painting, you begin to pay attention to smaller details. Ayoung girl is skipping through the lawn. One of the women is walking a monkey on a leash. The experience of seeing this painting is breathtaking. It is made even more remarkable if you move from looking at the painting from a distance to looking at it from a few inches from the canvas. Standing close up you can see that the subtle effects of light and shadow, the shimmering of the sun on the water, and the shapes of the figures are achieved with tiny dots of basic color spaced closely together.

The nuances of visual experience captured by Seurat's use of basic color form a metaphor for the ways in which basic domains of social knowledge interact to account for the subtleties and complexities of social life in context. Each domain is a discrete and distinct system corresponding to qualitatively different aspects of social interaction.