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Fechner's Aesthetics Revisited

Fechner's Aesthetics Revisited <jats:sec><jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Gustav Fechner is widely respected as a founding father of experimental psychology and psychophysics but fewer know of his interests and work in empirical aesthetics. In the later 1800s, toward the end of his career, Fechner performed experiments to empirically evaluate the beauty of rectangles, hypothesizing that the preferred shape would closely match that of the so-called 'golden rectangle'. His findings confirmed his suspicions, but in the intervening decades there has been significant evidence pointing away from that finding. Regardless of the results of this one study, Fechner ushered in the notion of using a metric to evaluate beauty in a psychophysical way. In this paper, we recreate the experiment using more naturalistic stimuli. We evaluate subjects' preferences against models that use various types of object complexity as metrics. Our findings that subjects prefer either very simple or very complex objects runs contrary to the hypothesized results, but are systematic none the less. We conclude that there are likely to be useful measures of aesthetic preference but they are likely to be complicated by the difficulty in defining some of their constituent parts.</jats:p> </jats:sec> http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Seeing and Perceiving (continuation of Spatial Vision from 2010 and continued as Multisensory Research from 2013) Brill

Fechner's Aesthetics Revisited

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References (21)

Publisher
Brill
Copyright
© 2010 Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
ISSN
1878-4755
eISSN
1878-4763
DOI
10.1163/187847510X516412
pmid
20819476
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

<jats:sec><jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Gustav Fechner is widely respected as a founding father of experimental psychology and psychophysics but fewer know of his interests and work in empirical aesthetics. In the later 1800s, toward the end of his career, Fechner performed experiments to empirically evaluate the beauty of rectangles, hypothesizing that the preferred shape would closely match that of the so-called 'golden rectangle'. His findings confirmed his suspicions, but in the intervening decades there has been significant evidence pointing away from that finding. Regardless of the results of this one study, Fechner ushered in the notion of using a metric to evaluate beauty in a psychophysical way. In this paper, we recreate the experiment using more naturalistic stimuli. We evaluate subjects' preferences against models that use various types of object complexity as metrics. Our findings that subjects prefer either very simple or very complex objects runs contrary to the hypothesized results, but are systematic none the less. We conclude that there are likely to be useful measures of aesthetic preference but they are likely to be complicated by the difficulty in defining some of their constituent parts.</jats:p> </jats:sec>

Journal

Seeing and Perceiving (continuation of Spatial Vision from 2010 and continued as Multisensory Research from 2013) – Brill

Published: Jan 1, 2010

Keywords: FORM; BEAUTY; FECHNER; AESTHETICS; SHAPE; HISTORY

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