Abstract
Here, we explore the question: What makes a photograph interesting? Answering this question deepens our understanding of human visual cognition and knowledge gained can be leveraged to reliably and widely disseminate information. Observers viewed images belonging to different categories, which covered a wide, representative spectrum of real-world scenes, in a self-paced manner and, at trial’s end, rated each image’s interestingness. Our studies revealed the following: landscapes were the most interesting of all categories tested, followed by scenes with people and cityscapes, followed still by aerial scenes, with indoor scenes of homes and offices being least interesting. Judgments of relative interestingness of pairs of images, setting a fixed viewing duration, or changing viewing history – all of the above manipulations failed to alter the hierarchy of image category interestingness, indicating that interestingness is an intrinsic property of an image unaffected by external manipulation or agent. Contrary to popular belief, low-level accounts based on computational image complexity, color, or viewing time failed to explain image interestingness: more interesting images were not viewed for longer and were not more complex or colorful. On the other hand, a single higher-order variable, namely image uprightness, significantly improved models of average interest. Observers’ eye movements partially predicted overall average interest: a regression model with number of fixations, mean fixation duration, and a custom measure of novel fixations explained >40% of variance. Our research revealed a clear category-based hierarchy of image interestingness, which appears to be a different dimension altogether from memorability or awe and is as yet unexplained by the dual appraisal hypothesis.
Highlights
There has been a surge of interest in interest—as an emotion, what functions it serves, what makes something interesting and its link to happiness (Silvia, 2008)
It is likely that one’s level of interest in each differs, perhaps because scenes of nature shot at eye level are more in line with our own daily experience and in the language of Silvia, rates high in appraisals of their comprehensibility (Silvia, 2005, 2006, 2008); on the other hand, scenes shot from the sky are novel relative to our daily experience and likely to be more complex from the viewpoint of fractal dimension or perceived complexity; in the language of Silvia, rates high in appraisals of their noveltycomplexity (Silvia, 2005, 2006, 2008)
We explored the contributions of novelty, low-level explanations based on image complexity, exposure or viewing time, and image category to reported level of interest; we further explored the extent to which eye scan patterns that individuals make while viewing a scene provides a window into their level of interest in the scene
Summary
There has been a surge of interest in interest—as an emotion, what functions it serves, what makes something interesting and its link to happiness (Silvia, 2008). One of the issues within this domain that has attracted interest is the question of what kinds of natural, real-world scenes are interesting. At the heart of this issue is the question of whether there is a hierarchy of preference for different domains. While it is known that scenes of nature are preferred over built scenes. No one has studied differences in interest between outdoor and indoor built scenes. The relative interestingness of a wide diversity of visual scenes remains an open question, and a significant one, for its own sake and because interest’s function is to motivate learning and exploration (Silvia, 2008); this newfound knowledge can be applied to practical problems of learning, education, marketing and others
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