Beauty and the Beholder: A Sensitive Relationship

Despite a rich set of experimental findings suggesting that certain stimulus qualities, such as symmetry, proportion, or complexity, are related to aesthetic appeal, the exact functional relationship between aesthetic experience and any of these stimulus qualities remains unknown. Motivated by our previous findings that humans display a consistent preference for a certain range of fractal dimension across fractal images of various types we turn to scale-specific processing of visual information to understand this relationship. Our hypothesis is that the preference for certain spatial structures, including fractals, can be partially accounted for by the visual system's general sensitivity for spatial variations at the spatial scales that most closely approximate given spatial structures. Although we do not offer a comprehensive model of aesthetic experience, we demonstrate a strong relationship between visual preference for simple visual patterns and visual sensitivity. Our results support assertions that there is a close relationship between aesthetic experience and the coding of natural stimuli.