Seeing Chirality Correlates with Aesthetic Perception
Overview
A research project investigating the relationship between our perception of mirrored images and our aesthetic experience, in collaboration with Yi-Chia Chen and Hongjing Lu from the UCLA Computational Vision and Learning Lab
Team
Myself, Yi-Chia Chen, and Hongjing Lu
Role
Researcher
Question
We encounter mirrored sceneries often in our daily lives, but does our perception care about chirality - the visual differences between an original image and its mirrored orientation?
How does this perception interact with our aesthetic experience?
Stimuli
An image set consisting of 78 social images of people and 78 inanimate images of inanimate scenes was presented. The theme of each image was matched across the social and inanimate categories.
Tasks
Our experiment involved two tasks, the first being a chiral discrimination task. Participants were shown an image and its mirrored orientation and were asked to select what they believed was the original orientation.
The second task, which immediately followed the first task, was an aesthetic rating task. Participants viewed the same images one-by-one and rated the aesthetic appeal of each image on a scale of 1 to 6.
Results
Explicit judgment of the original orientation is difficult, as performance for both social and inanimate images were around change level. However, social cues for chirality (like handedness) seem to exist.
There was no significant difference between the aesthetic values of the actual orientations of the images. However, the orientation that participants perceived to be original were rated as more aesthetically pleasing than what they perceived as mirrored.
For each image, we correlated the average chiral discrimination accuracy (Task 1) with the average difference between the aesthetic ratings of the original orientation and the mirrored orientation (subtracting the mirrored rating from the original rating in Task 2). We found a significant positive correlation between discrimination accuracy and rating difference for inanimate images and a near-significant positive correlation for social images, suggesting that the orientation that appears better-looking is perceived as original.
The results of this experiment reveal that common mental processes underlie our perception of chriality and aesthetics.
