Inferring Master Painters' Esthetic Biases from the Statistics of Portraits.
Inferring Master Painters' Esthetic Biases from the Statistics of Portraits.
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DOI：
10.3389/fnhum.2017.00094
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发表时间：
2017
影响因子：
2.9
通讯作者：
Grzywacz NM
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Aleem H;Correa-Herran I;Grzywacz NM
处理流畅理论认为，大脑中感官信息处理的便捷性有利于审美愉悦。因此，该理论预测大师级画家应该表现出对对称、平衡和适度复杂性等视觉特性的偏见。这些偏差是否已经发生？如果是，画家是否正在优化这些属性（流畅度变量）？在这里，我们通过文艺复兴早期肖像画的统计来回答这些问题。为此，我们首先为上述每个流畅度变量开发了不同的计算方法。然后，我们测量了 26 名画家的 153 幅肖像、27 幅人物处于三种受控姿势的照片以及 38 幅快速拍摄的个人照片的统计数据。对文艺复兴早期的肖像和快速拍摄的照片进行统计比较表明，画家表现出对平衡、对称和适度复杂性的偏见。然而，肖像和控制姿势照片之间的比较表明，画家并没有优化这些属性。相反，不同的画家对不同的、狭窄的流畅度变量存在偏见。进一步的分析表明，画家的个性部分源于必须解决复杂性与对称性和平衡之间的紧张关系。我们还发现，不同画家使用不同绘画材料的限制系统地调节了这些流畅性变量。总之，如果我们要将审美愉悦的加工流畅理论应用于视觉艺术史，则需要对其进行扩展，因为它无法解释每个流畅变量缺乏优化的情况。为了扩展该理论，我们提出了神经美学空间的存在，其中包含每个流畅度变量在任何给定艺术时期可以达到的可能值。我们讨论了这个空间的神经机制，并提出它在人脑中具有分布式表示。我们进一步建议不同的艺术家居住在空间的不同的小分区中。这种神经美学空间假说提出了画家及其绘画如何在艺术时期演变的问题。
The Processing Fluency Theory posits that the ease of sensory information processing in the brain facilitates esthetic pleasure. Accordingly, the theory would predict that master painters should display biases toward visual properties such as symmetry, balance, and moderate complexity. Have these biases been occurring and if so, have painters been optimizing these properties (fluency variables)? Here, we address these questions with statistics of portrait paintings from the Early Renaissance period. To do this, we first developed different computational measures for each of the aforementioned fluency variables. Then, we measured their statistics in 153 portraits from 26 master painters, in 27 photographs of people in three controlled poses, and in 38 quickly snapped photographs of individual persons. A statistical comparison between Early Renaissance portraits and quickly snapped photographs revealed that painters showed a bias toward balance, symmetry, and moderate complexity. However, a comparison between portraits and controlled-pose photographs showed that painters did not optimize each of these properties. Instead, different painters presented biases toward different, narrow ranges of fluency variables. Further analysis suggested that the painters' individuality stemmed in part from having to resolve the tension between complexity vs. symmetry and balance. We additionally found that constraints on the use of different painting materials by distinct painters modulated these fluency variables systematically. In conclusion, the Processing Fluency Theory of Esthetic Pleasure would need expansion if we were to apply it to the history of visual art since it cannot explain the lack of optimization of each fluency variables. To expand the theory, we propose the existence of a Neuroesthetic Space, which encompasses the possible values that each of the fluency variables can reach in any given art period. We discuss the neural mechanisms of this Space and propose that it has a distributed representation in the human brain. We further propose that different artists reside in different, small sub-regions of the Space. This Neuroesthetic-Space hypothesis raises the question of how painters and their paintings evolve across art periods.