Phillips Flip, Norman J Farley, Beers Amanda M
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience Program, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866, USA.
Seeing Perceiving. 2010;23(3):263-71. doi: 10.1163/187847510X516412.
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.
古斯塔夫·费希纳作为实验心理学和心理物理学的奠基人广受尊敬，但了解他在实证美学方面的兴趣和工作的人却较少。在19世纪后期，临近职业生涯末期时，费希纳进行了实验，以实证方式评估矩形的美感，他假设人们偏爱的形状将与所谓的“黄金矩形”非常接近。他的研究结果证实了他的猜想，但在随后的几十年里，有大量证据表明该结论并不成立。尽管这项研究结果如此，费希纳开创了以心理物理学方式使用一种度量来评估美感的理念。在本文中，我们使用更自然主义的刺激物重现了该实验。我们根据使用各种类型的物体复杂性作为度量的模型来评估受试者的偏好。我们的研究结果表明，受试者更喜欢非常简单或非常复杂的物体，这与假设结果相反，但仍然是有规律的。我们得出结论，可能存在有用的审美偏好度量方法，但它们可能会因定义其中一些组成部分的困难而变得复杂。
