Appealing, disgusting and threatening visual features determined using an evolutionary algorithm
Matthew L Welchman Patten, Josh Brunker, Raghba Latifi, Tamara Watson · 2024
Individuals make automatic aesthetic judgements potentially supporting an approach or avoidance posture towards everyday objects. The current study uses a novel evolutionary approach to explore which features of a complex flower-like stimulus reliably emerge as appealing, easy to view, disgusting and threatening. Across three experiments the procedure used approximately 20 parameters that became more or less likely to appear within the stimuli as participants selected the most and least appealing, easy to view, disgusting or threatening flowers from a selection of six flowers per trial. Most important to appeal was a high number of outer petals (ray florets) and symmetrical arrangement of outer petals. This was also found to be important to ease of viewing, consistent with the fluency processing theory of aesthetic appeal. The presence of binarized fractals was found to be important to the perception threat and disgust. This was unexpected but potentially mimics patterning on animals such as a saturated red against a black body. The novel evolutionary method developed for establishing the features important to a perceptual judgment shows potential for use with complex and high feature space stimuli.