Changing What You Like: Modifying Contour Properties Shifts Aesthetic Valuations of Scenes
研究通过操纵场景的轮廓属性来改变审美评价，发现轮廓与审美价值存在因果关系，支持视觉规律是人类从视觉信息中获得愉悦的基础。
To what extent do aesthetic experiences arise from the human ability to perceive and extract meaning from visual features? Ordinary scenes, such as a beach sunset, can elicit a sense of beauty in most observers. Although it appears that aesthetic responses can be shared among humans, little is known about the cognitive mechanisms that underlie this phenomenon. We developed a contour model of aesthetics that assigns values to visual properties in scenes, allowing us to predict aesthetic responses in adults from around the world. Through a series of experiments, we manipulate contours to increase or decrease aesthetic value while preserving scene semantic identity. Contour manipulations directly shift subjective aesthetic judgments. This provides the first experimental evidence for a causal relationship between contour properties and aesthetic valuation. Our findings support the notion that visual regularities underlie the human capacity to derive pleasure from visual information.