Visual cortex activation predicts visual preference: Evidence from Britain and Egypt

Abstract

The term “Perceptual goodness” refers to the strength, obviousness, or salience of a visual configuration. Recent work has found strong agreement between theoretical, neural, and behavioural measures of perceptual goodness across a wide range of different symmetrical visual patterns. We used these pattern types again to explore the relationship between perceptual goodness and aesthetic preference. A group of 50 U.K. participants rated the patterns on a 0 to 100 scale. Preference ratings positively correlated with four overlapping measures of perceptual goodness. We then replicated this finding in Egypt, suggesting that our results reflect universal aspects of human preference. The third experiment provided consistent results with a different stimulus set. We conclude that symmetry is an aesthetic primitive that is attractive because of the way it is processed by the visual system.