Visual Aesthetics and Human Preference

Palmer, Stephen; Schloss, Karen B.; Sammartino, Jonathan

doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-120710-100504

Cited by 520 publications

(510 citation statements)

References 132 publications

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“…Participants performed four practice trials before receiving TMS (see below) to familiarize with the task. Moreover, all sentences were presented once in a random order before TMS was given to ensure that participants had knowledge of the type of actions described and of their "morality" range, and could adjust their rating criterion accordingly before the experiment (Palmer, Schloss, & Sammartino, 2013). The experimental task took approximately 7 minutes and was performed immediately after the end of the TMS stimulation (see below).…”

Section: Stimuli and Proceduresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interfering with activity in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex via TMS affects social impressions updating

Ferrari

Vecchi

Todorov

et al. 2016

Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci

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In our everyday social interactions we often need to deal with others' unpredictable behaviors. Integrating unexpected information in a consistent representation of another agent is a cognitively demanding process. Several neuroimaging studies point to the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) as a critical structure in mediating social evaluations. Our aim here was to shed light on the possible causal role of the mPFC in the dynamic process of forming and updating social impressions about others. We addressed this issue by suppressing activity in the mPFC by means of 1 Hz offline transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) prior to a task requiring participants to evaluate other agents' trustworthiness after reading about their social behavior. In two different experiments, we found that inhibiting activity in the mPFC increased perceived trustworthiness when inconsistent information about one agent's behavior was provided. In turn, when only negative or positive behaviors of a person were described, TMS over the mPFC did not affect judgments. Our results indicate that the mPFC is causally involved in mediating social impressions updating-at least in cases in which judgment is uncertain due to conflicting information to be processed.

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Section: Stimuli and Proceduresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interfering with activity in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex via TMS affects social impressions updating

Ferrari

Vecchi

Todorov

et al. 2016

Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci

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“…Support for sensory bias potentially influencing human aesthetic sense comes from work on colour judgments indicating consensus preferences for particular colour (hue) and lightness combinations in the absence of any other cues [23 -25]. In particular, these studies find cross-cultural preferences for light-blues and aversions to dark-yellows [23][24][25], yet this bias may not fit the observed attraction to carotenoid skin coloration.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

It is all in the face: carotenoid skin coloration loses attractiveness outside the face

et al. 2013

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Recently, the importance of skin colour for facial attractiveness has been recognized. In particular, dietary carotenoid-induced skin colour has been proposed as a signal of health and therefore attractiveness. While perceptual results are highly consistent, it is currently not clear whether carotenoid skin colour is preferred because it poses a cue to current health condition in humans or whether it is simply seen as a more aesthetically pleasing colour, independently of skin-specific signalling properties. Here, we tested this question by comparing attractiveness ratings of faces to corresponding ratings of meaningless scrambled face images matching the colours and contrasts found in the face. We produced sets of face and non-face stimuli with either healthy (high-carotenoid coloration) or unhealthy (low-carotenoid coloration) colour and asked participants for attractiveness ratings. Results showed that, while for faces increased carotenoid coloration significantly improved attractiveness, there was no equivalent effect on perception of scrambled images. These findings are consistent with a specific signalling system of current condition through skin coloration in humans and indicate that preferences are not caused by sensory biases in observers.

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“…The processes of aesthetic experience has been studied scientifically since Gustave Fechner (Fechner, 1898), from psychology (Palmer, Schloss & Sammartino, 2013) to neuroaesthetics (Cinzia & Vittorio, 2009, Jacobsen, 2010, Zeki, 1999, but the underlying mechanisms and laws are still largely unknown.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The colors of paintings and viewers’ preferences

et al. 2017

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Abstract. One hypothesis to explain the aesthetics of paintings is that it depends on the extent to which they mimic natural image statistics. In fact, paintings and natural scenes share several statistical image regularities but the colors of paintings seem generally more biased towards red than natural scenes. Is the particular option for colors in each painting, even if less naturalistic, critical for perceived beauty? Here we show that it is. In the experiments, 50 naïve observers, unfamiliar with the 10 paintings tested, could rotate the color gamut of the paintings and select the one producing the best subjective impression. The distributions of angles obtained are described by normal distributions with maxima deviating, on average, only 7 degrees from the original gamut orientation and full width at half maximum just above the threshold to perceive a chromatic change in the paintings. Crucially, for data pooled across observers and abstract paintings the maximum of the distribution was at zero degrees, i.e., the same as the original. This demonstrates that artists know what chromatic compositions match viewers' preferences and that the option for less naturalistic colors does not constraint the aesthetic value of paintings.3

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Visual Aesthetics and Human Preference

Cited by 520 publications

References 132 publications

Interfering with activity in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex via TMS affects social impressions updating

Interfering with activity in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex via TMS affects social impressions updating

It is all in the face: carotenoid skin coloration loses attractiveness outside the face

The colors of paintings and viewers’ preferences

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