Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics ( IF 1.7 ) Pub Date : 2021-04-02 , DOI: 10.3758/s13414-021-02289-y Isabella R. Forman , Yi-Chia Chen , Brian J. Scholl , George A. Alvarez
Although most visual aesthetic preferences are likely driven by a mix of personal, historical, and cultural factors, there are exceptions: some may be driven by adaptive mechanisms of visual processing, and so may be relatively consistent across people, contexts, and time. An especially powerful example is the “inward bias”: when a framed image contains a figure (e.g., a face in profile), people prefer arrangements in which the figure faces inward. Although the inward bias has been studied in many contexts, its underlying nature remains unclear. It may be a function of an image’s center (as in the “affordance-space” account, in which people prefer to center the implied functional extensions of objects), or it may be a function of the frame’s borders (as in the “looking-into-the-future” account, in which people dislike perspectives on scenes that won’t allow them to witness predicted future actions). Here we directly contrast these possibilities using a simple novel manipulation. Observers placed a face (in profile) in a frame to maximize the image’s aesthetic appeal, and across observers we varied the frame’s aspect ratio. We observed a powerful inward bias, and across frame widths observers preferred an approximately constant positive ratio of space in front versus behind the face. This suggests that the inward bias is driven primarily not by the image’s center, but by the frame’s borders — and it is consistent with the possibility that certain regions of empty space are prioritized because they are where future actions are predicted to occur.
中文翻译:
中心无法容纳:镜框宽度的变化有助于解释审美偏好中的“内向偏见”
尽管大多数视觉美学偏好可能是由个人,历史和文化因素共同驱动的,但也有例外:某些视觉偏好可能是由视觉处理的自适应机制驱动的,因此在人,环境和时间方面可能相对一致。一个特别有力的例子是“向内偏向”:当带框的图像包含人物(例如,轮廓中的脸)时,人们更喜欢人物朝内的布置。尽管已在许多情况下研究了内向偏见,但其内在本质仍不清楚。它可能是图像中心的函数(例如在“负担空间”帐户中,人们倾向于将对象的隐式功能扩展定为中心),或者可能是框架边框的函数(如“展望未来”的说法,人们不喜欢场景的观点,使他们无法目睹预期的未来行动)。在这里,我们使用简单的新颖操作直接对比这些可能性。观察者将面部(轮廓)放置在框架中以最大化图像的美学吸引力,并且在观察者中,我们改变了框架的纵横比。我们观察到强烈的向内偏见,并且在整个画幅宽度上,观察者更喜欢正面和背面的空间近似恒定的正比。这表明向内偏移主要不是由图像的中心驱动,而是由帧的边界驱动,这与对某些空白区域进行优先级排序的可能性是一致的,因为它们是将来可能发生动作的地方。