Liking versus Complexity: Decomposing the Inverted U-curve

The relationship between liking and stimulus complexity is commonly reported to follow an inverted U-curve. However, large individual differences among complexity preferences of participants have frequently been observed since the earliest studies on the topic. The common use of across-participant a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Frontiers in human neuroscience Vol. 10; p. 112
Main Authors: Güçlütürk, Yağmur, Jacobs, Richard H. A. H., Lier, Rob van
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Switzerland Frontiers Research Foundation 18.03.2016
Frontiers Media S.A
Subjects:
Aesthetics
Algorithms
Artificial intelligence
Beauty
Cluster analysis
Clustering
Complexity
Data mining
Experimental aesthetics
Fractals
individual differences
liking
Neuroscience
Personality
Personality traits
Preferences
Studies
complexity
liking
experimental aesthetics
clustering analysis
individual differences
ISSN:1662-5161, 1662-5161
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The relationship between liking and stimulus complexity is commonly reported to follow an inverted U-curve. However, large individual differences among complexity preferences of participants have frequently been observed since the earliest studies on the topic. The common use of across-participant analysis methods that ignore these large individual differences in aesthetic preferences gives an impression of high agreement between individuals. In this study, we collected ratings of liking and perceived complexity from 30 participants for a set of digitally generated grayscale images. In addition, we calculated an objective measure of complexity for each image. Our results reveal that the inverted U-curve relationship between liking and stimulus complexity comes about as the combination of different individual liking functions. Specifically, after automatically clustering the participants based on their liking ratings, we determined that one group of participants in our sample had increasingly lower liking ratings for increasingly more complex stimuli, while a second group of participants had increasingly higher liking ratings for increasingly more complex stimuli. Based on our findings, we call for a focus on the individual differences in aesthetic preferences, adoption of alternative analysis methods that would account for these differences and a re-evaluation of established rules of human aesthetic preferences.
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Edited by: Christoph Redies, University of Jena School of Medicine, Germany
Reviewed by: Marcos Nadal, University of Vienna, Austria; Jan R. Landwehr, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany
ISSN:1662-5161
1662-5161
DOI:10.3389/fnhum.2016.00112