Does beauty capture the eye, even if it's not (overtly) adaptive? A comparative eye-tracking study of spontaneous attention and visual preference with VAST abstract art

Abstract

Studies have routinely shown that individuals spend more time spontaneously looking at people or at mimetic scenes that they subsequently judge to be more aesthetically appealing. This “beauty demands longer looks” phenomenon is typically explained by biological relevance, personal utility, or other survival factors, with visual attraction often driven by structural features (symmetry, texture), which may signify fitness and to which most humans tend to respond similarly. However, what of objects that have less overtly adaptive relevance? Here, we consider whether people also look longer at abstract art with little associative/mimetic content that they subsequently rate for higher aesthetic appeal. We employed the “Visual aesthetic sensitivity test” (VAST), which consists of pairs of matched abstract designs with one example of each pair argued to be objectively ‘aesthetically better’ in regards to low-level features, thus offering a potential contrast between ‘objective’ (physical feature-based) and ‘subjective’ (personal taste-based) assessments. Participants (29 women) first looked at image pairs without a specific task and then in three follow-up blocks indicated their preference within the pairs and rated the individual images for liking and for presumed ratings by an art expert. More preferred designs were looked at longer. However, longer looking only occurred in line with participants' subjective tastes. This suggests a general correlation of attention and visual beauty, which—in abstract art—may nonetheless be related to features that are not identified by experts as more generally appealing and thus may not directly map to other (more utility-related) stimuli types.