Aesthetic issues in spatial composition: Effects of vertical position and perspective on framing single objects.

Sammartino, Jonathan; Palmer, Stephen

doi:10.1037/a0027736

Cited by 28 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…An inward bias is also evident in artists' paintings and drawings of animals Bertamini et al (2011). Sammartino & Palmer (2012a) found similar biases in preferences for vertical position of single object pictures. For example, when the image of an object was symmetrical about a horizontal axis (e.g., an eagle seen from directly above or below), they found a center bias.…”

Section: Compositional Biases In Pictures Of Meaningful Objectsmentioning

confidence: 61%

Visual Aesthetics and Human Preference

Palmer

Schloss

Sammartino

2013

Annu. Rev. Psychol.

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502

441

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Human aesthetic preference in the visual domain is reviewed from definitional, methodological, empirical, and theoretical perspectives. Aesthetic science is distinguished from the perception of art and from philosophical treatments of aesthetics. The strengths and weaknesses of important behavioral techniques are presented and discussed, including two-alternative forced-choice, rank order, subjective rating, production/adjustment, indirect, and other tasks. Major findings are reviewed about preferences for colors (single colors, color combinations, and color harmony), spatial structure (low-level spatial properties, shape properties, and spatial composition within a frame), and individual differences in both color and spatial structure. Major theoretical accounts of aesthetic response are outlined and evaluated, including explanations in terms of mere exposure effects, arousal dynamics, categorical prototypes, ecological factors, perceptual and conceptual fluency, and the interaction of multiple components. The results of the review support the conclusion that aesthetic response can be studied rigorously and meaningfully within the framework of scientific psychology.

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Section: Compositional Biases In Pictures Of Meaningful Objectsmentioning

confidence: 61%

Visual Aesthetics and Human Preference

Palmer

Schloss

Sammartino

2013

Annu. Rev. Psychol.

Self Cite

502

441

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“…They conducted a series of psychological experiments that confirmed the on-center bias, but only for forward-facing symmetrical objects; left-facing and right-facing objects tended to be located off-center. For vertically positioned objects, people preferred positions in the image that reflected spatial asymmetries in their functional properties and the typical position of the object relative to the observer (Sammartino and Palmer, 2012). Moreover, Leyssen et al (2012) demonstrated that semantics plays a role in images containing two meaningful objects.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Evaluating the Rule of Thirds in Photographs and Paintings

et al. 2014

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The rule of thirds (ROT) is one of the best-known composition rules used in painting and photography. According to this rule, the focus point of an image should be placed along one of the third lines or on one of the four intersections of the third lines, to give aesthetically pleasing results. Recently, calculated saliency maps have been used in an attempt to predict whether or not images obey the rule of thirds. In the present study, we challenged this computer-based approach by comparing calculated ROT values with behavioral (subjective) ROT scores obtained from 30 participants in a psychological experiment. For photographs that did not follow the rule of thirds, subjective ROT scores matched calculated ROT values reasonably well. For photographs that followed the rule of thirds, we found a moderate correlation between subjective scores and calculated values. However, aesthetic rating scores correlated only weakly with subjective ROT scores and not at all with calculated ROT values. Moreover, for photographs that were rated as highly aesthetic and for a large set of paintings, calculated ROT values were about as low as in photographs that did not follow the rule of thirds. In conclusion, the computer-based ROT metrics can predict the behavioral data, but not completely. Despite its proclaimed importance in artistic composition, the rule of thirds seems to play only a minor, if any, role in large sets of high-quality photographs and paintings.

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“…There exists a body of work endeavouring to understand visual balance and its relation with symmetry [4] about vertical [5][6][7] and horizontal [7] axes, content of the scene [8], color contrast [9,10], and styles in abstract and representational artworks [11][12][13][14].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning visual balance from large-scale datasets of aesthetically highly rated images

Jahanian

Vishwanathan

Allebach

2015

Human Vision and Electronic Imaging XX

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The concept of visual balance is innate for humans, and influences how we perceive visual aesthetics and cognize harmony. Although visual balance is a vital principle of design and taught in schools of designs, it is barely quantified. On the other hand, with emergence of automantic/semi-automatic visual designs for self-publishing, learning visual balance and computationally modeling it, may escalate aesthetics of such designs. In this paper, we present how questing for understanding visual balance inspired us to revisit one of the well-known theories in visual arts, the so called theory of "visual rightness", elucidated by Arnheim. We define Arnheim's hypothesis as a design mining problem with the goal of learning visual balance from work of professionals. We collected a dataset of 120K images that are aesthetically highly rated, from a professional photography website. We then computed factors that contribute to visual balance based on the notion of visual saliency. We fitted a mixture of Gaussians to the saliency maps of the images, and obtained the hotspots of the images. Our inferred Gaussians align with Arnheim's hotspots, and confirm his theory. Moreover, the results support the viability of the center of mass, symmetry, as well as the Rule of Thirds in our dataset.

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Aesthetic issues in spatial composition: Effects of vertical position and perspective on framing single objects.

Cited by 28 publications

References 37 publications

Visual Aesthetics and Human Preference

Visual Aesthetics and Human Preference

Evaluating the Rule of Thirds in Photographs and Paintings

Learning visual balance from large-scale datasets of aesthetically highly rated images

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