Abstract
Trypophobia refers to the visual discomfort experienced by some people when viewing clustered patterns (e.g., clusters of holes). Trypophobic images deviate from the 1/f amplitude spectra typically characterizing natural images by containing excess energy at mid-range spatial frequencies. While recent work provides partial support for the idea of excess mid-range spatial frequency energy causing visual discomfort when viewing trypophobic images, a full factorial manipulation of image phase and amplitude spectra has yet to be conducted in order to determine whether the phase spectrum (sinusoidal waveform patterns that comprise image details like edge and texture elements) also plays a role in trypophobic discomfort. Here, we independently manipulated the phase and amplitude spectra of 31 Trypophobic images using a standard Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). Participants rated the four different versions of each image for levels of visual comfort, and completed the Trypophobia Questionnaire (TQ). Images having the original phase spectra intact (with either original or 1/f amplitude) explained the most variance in comfort ratings and were rated lowest in comfort. However, images with the original amplitude spectra but scrambled phase spectra were rated higher in comfort, with a smaller amount of variance in comfort attributed to the amplitude spectrum. Participant TQ scores correlated with comfort ratings only for images having the original phase spectra intact. There was no correlation between TQ scores and comfort levels when participants viewed the original amplitude / phase-scrambled images. Taken together, the present findings show that the phase spectrum of trypophobic images, which determines the pattern of small clusters of objects, plays a much larger role than the amplitude spectrum in determining visual discomfort.
Highlights
Trypophobia is a recently documented perceptual phenomenon characterized by extreme negative reactions when viewing repetitive clusters of objects, usually holes or bumps (Cole and Wilkins, 2013; Le et al, 2015)
Some images were obtained from websites devoted to trypophobia, while other images were provided by Arnold Wilkins and were used in Cole and Wilkins (2013), Pipitone et al (2017)
Most work investigating trypophobia discusses the negative reactions when viewing these images as stemming from excess energy at mid-range spatial frequencies (Cole and Wilkins, 2013; Sasaki et al, 2017) which supports other work showing that deviations from natural 1/f amplitude spectra affects visual comfort (Fernandez and Wilkins, 2008; Juricevic et al, 2010; O’Hare and Hibbard, 2011; Hibbard and O’Hare, 2015)
Summary
Trypophobia is a recently documented perceptual phenomenon characterized by extreme negative reactions when viewing repetitive clusters of objects, usually holes or bumps (Cole and Wilkins, 2013; Le et al, 2015). One proposal is that the characteristic trypophobic patterns contain excessive energy at mid-range spatial frequencies, as defined in previous work (Sasaki et al, 2017: 2–9 cycles per degree of visual angle (cpd); Fernandez and Wilkins, 2008: 3 cpd ±2 octaves). This same spectral energy profile can be observed in the patterning of many venomous and/or predatory animals like snakes and spiders, provided that these stimuli are viewed at the appropriate distance (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Using a continuous flash suppression technique to measure access to early visual awareness, Shirai and Ogawa (2019) recently showed that trypophobic images enter visual awareness earlier than fearful or neutral images, but a second experiment in which these images were phase-scrambled (but the original amplitude spectrum was left intact) mitigated the early awareness effect
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