Aesthetic Science of Color and Spatial Composition

目前的研究项目旨在了解人们对简单的视觉展示图像的空间构成和色彩构成的审美反应。尽管审美评价在我们的日常生活中很重要——不仅在我们参观博物馆的时候，而且在我们买衣服、选电影、度假、装饰房子和美化院子的时候——令人惊讶的是，我们对人们喜欢什么样的颜色组合和空间安排的科学知之甚少。大多数先前的治疗来自哲学家、艺术家和艺术理论家，他们采取一种说明性的方法，说明人们应该在美学上更喜欢什么。在这个项目中，首席研究员通过分析人们的审美偏好和决定这些审美偏好的变量，采取了科学的描述性方法。例如，关于空间构图的早期发现表明，人们更喜欢将对称视图（如人脸的正面视图）放置在图像的中心或附近，而将不对称视图（如人脸的侧视图）放置在偏离中心的侧面，使其面向框架。例如，关于色彩构成的早期发现表明，人们通常更喜欢包含相似（而不是对比色）的颜色对，但与高度对比色（而不是相似色）相比，特定的颜色看起来更美观。拟议中的研究项目在艺术与科学之间架起了一座有希望的新桥。它定义了一种跨学科的研究努力——称为美学科学——它使用定义良好的行为方法来理解人类经验的美学维度，这与充分研究的经验的认知（基于知识的）方面和情感（基于感觉的）方面不同。它还定义了新的研究方法，旨在了解不同审美领域的个体之间不同的审美偏好模式。例如，那些喜欢不同寻常、强烈对比的色彩组合的人是否也喜欢意想不到的空间构成？考虑到在一个未被充分研究的主题上提出的研究的开创性，所有的新发现都是可能的，无论是在美学科学领域，还是将其与现有的情感和认知科学领域的知识联系起来。

The present research project aims to understand how people respond aesthetically to the spatial composition and color composition of simple, visually displayed images. Despite the importance of aesthetic evaluations in our everyday lives -- not only when we visit museums, but also when we buy clothes, choose movies, take vacations, decorate our homes, and landscape our yards -- surprisingly little is known scientifically about what color combinations and spatial arrangements people prefer. Most previous treatments have come from philosophers, artists, and art theorists, who take a prescriptive approach by stating what one should prefer aesthetically. In this project the principal investigator takes a scientific, descriptive approach by analyzing what people actually do prefer aesthetically and the variables that determine these aesthetic preferences. Early findings on spatial composition show, for example, that people prefer symmetrical views of an object (such as a front-view of a face) to be positioned at or near the center of the image, but asymmetrical views (such as a side-view of a face) to be positioned laterally off center so that it faces into the frame. Early findings on color composition show, for instance, that people generally prefer pairs of colors that contain similar (rather than contrasting) colors, but that a given color looks more aesthetically pleasing against a highly contrasting (rather than a similar) color. The proposed research project provides a promising new bridge between art and science. It defines an interdisciplinary research endeavor -- called aesthetic science -- that uses well-defined behavioral methods to understand an aesthetic dimension of human experience that is distinct from the well-studied cognitive (knowledge-based) aspects and emotional (feeling-based) aspects of experience. It also defines new research methods aimed at understanding different patterns of aesthetic preference between individuals across different aesthetic domains. Do people who prefer unusual, highly contrasting color combinations, for example, also prefer unexpected spatial compositions? Given the pioneering nature of the proposed research on an under-studied topic, all manner of new discoveries are possible, both within the field of aesthetic science and linking it with knowledge in the existing fields of emotion and cognitive science.