Beauty And The Brain
“Easy On The Eyes” May Hit Closer To The Mark Than We Thought.
Experiments led by Piotr Winkielman, of the University of California, San Diego, and published in the current issue of Psychological Science, suggest that judgments of attractiveness depend on mental processing ease, or being “easy on the mind.”
“What you like is a function of what your mind has been trained on,” Winkielman said. “A stimulus becomes attractive if it falls into the average of what you’ve seen and is therefore simple for your brain to process. In our experiments, we show that we can make an arbitrary pattern likeable just by preparing the mind to recognize it quickly.”
Humans have similar preferences for prototypes in a wide variety of other categories, including dogs, birds, fish, cars and even watches.
Yet the question “why?” has remained open. A popular explanation has been an evolutionary, sexual-selection one that goes something as follows: Like symmetry (another reliable predictor of attractiveness), prototypicality signals health and fitness - unusually protuberant eyes might be a clue to disease, for example - and so is a kind of shorthand for the value of a potential mate.
Read more.