Abstract
Increasing psychophysical evidence suggests that specific image features – or statistics – can appear unpleasant or induce visual discomfort in humans. Such unpleasantness tends to be particularly profound if the image’s amplitude spectrum deviates from the regular 1/f spatial-frequency falloff expected in natural scenes. Here, we show that profound unpleasant impressions also result if the orientation spectrum of the image becomes flatter. Using bandpass noise with variable orientation and spatial-frequency bandwidths, we found that unpleasantness ratings decreased with spatial- frequency bandwidth but increased with orientation bandwidth. Similarly, a subsequent experiment revealed that sinusoidal modulations in the amplitude spectrum of 1/f noise along the spatial frequency increased unpleasantness, but modulations along the orientation decreased it. Given that natural scenes tend to have a linear slope along the spatial frequency but an uneven spectrum along the orientation dimension, our opposing results in the spatial-frequency and orientation domains commonly support the idea that images deviating from the spectral regularity of natural scenes can give rise to unpleasant impressions.
Highlights
Humans tend to prefer things that appear pleasant or clean to those that appear unpleasant or dirty
A one-way ANOVA performed for the spectral slope showed a main effect of spectral slope [F(3,33) = 8.85; p = 0.0002; ηG2 = 0.044]. These results show that unpleasantness is more profound if spatial frequency bandwidth is narrower and orientation bandwidth is broader
The results obtained for orientation bandwidth appear to be opposite of those for spatial frequency
Summary
Humans tend to prefer things that appear pleasant or clean to those that appear unpleasant or dirty. While such affective responses are usually evoked by the recognition of object category (e.g., rotten food) learned through daily experiences (Coon and Mitterer, 2012), affect may be summoned by the visual appearance of the image itself. Normal observers report discomfort with images whose Fourier amplitude spectrum has a peak at spatial frequencies around 1–3 c/deg and that deviates from the so-called 1/f α spectral falloff that is characteristic of natural scenes (Wilkins et al, 1984; Wilkins, 1995; Fernandez and Wilkins, 2008; O’Hare and Hibbard, 2011). An image including such a middle-frequency spectral peak – a cluster of holes
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