The Psychology of Aesthetics

Summary

Highlights

• Rich Ivory introduces UC Berkeley's inaugural psychology outreach event focused on aesthetics in the art world. 🎤
• Art Shimamura and Steve Palmer share their passion for photography, art, and science of aesthetics. 📸
• George Stratton's pivotal experiments on perception laid foundational work for psychological studies in aesthetics. 🔄
• Art and Steve discuss how their personal journeys in photography influenced their aesthetic research. 🌿
• Steve Palmer presents art that challenges traditional aesthetic standards, including influential work like Duchamp's urinal. 🚽

Key Takeaways

• Aesthetics isn't confined to art; it permeates all areas of life, from architecture to music and everyday objects. 🎨
• Psychological principles like perception and memory play a key role in how we perceive art and beauty. 🧠
• Cultural and individual differences significantly influence aesthetic preferences. 🌎
• Understanding aesthetics can provide insights into broader human preferences and behaviors. 🧐
• Art appreciation involves sensory, emotional, and knowledge-based processes, showcasing art as a multifaceted experience. 🌟

Overview

Chapters

• 00:00 - 03:00: Introduction to the Inaugural Department Outreach Event Rich Ivory, the chair of the psychology department, welcomes attendees to their inaugural Department Outreach Event. He highlights the exciting developments within the department and expresses the need for such an event to share these happenings with a broader audience.
• 03:00 - 09:00: The Science of and Psychology’s Interest in Aesthetics The chapter titled 'The Science of and Psychology’s Interest in Aesthetics' discusses the mission of sharing insights related to the field of aesthetics, particularly from the perspective of psychology. It highlights the aim of spreading knowledge gathered from academic research in Tolman Hall. The chapter indicates an effort to engage people, particularly alumni from Cal and the respective department, by organizing events that share this specialized knowledge and draw interest from a broad audience.
• 09:00 - 17:00: Speakers' Backgrounds and Interests in Aesthetics The chapter discusses the background and interests of various speakers in relation to aesthetics. It begins with a welcome note to the audience, encouraging them to sign up for updates and stay engaged with the department. The presence of a diverse audience, including undergraduates and young potential future alumni, is noted. A reference is made to a newsletter sent out earlier, emphasizing the importance of maintaining contact with the department.
• 17:00 - 25:00: Understanding Aesthetic Experience: Art's Perspective The chapter discusses the value of a psychology degree and the career paths of psychology undergraduates. The speaker acknowledges that there has been a lack of follow-up with graduates to understand their career trajectories post-graduation. There is a desire to collect and share this information with current and future psychology students to better inform them of potential outcomes and opportunities after completing their degree. The chapter reflects on the importance of understanding what psychology majors do after their studies to provide more guidance and support to new students entering the field.
• 25:00 - 33:30: Scientific Approach to Aesthetics: Steve's Perspective The chapter titled, 'Scientific Approach to Aesthetics: Steve's Perspective,' involves the speaker discussing potential involvement through newsletters and donations. The speaker outlines how signing up for newsletters can keep one informed on a semi-annual basis. Additionally, they encourage participation through sponsorships and donations to support the educational and outreach missions of the department.
• 33:30 - 47:00: Studies on Spatial Composition and Color Preferences In this chapter, the discussion centers around the intersection of aesthetics and psychology, specifically exploring how psychologists study aesthetic preferences despite often dwelling in environments perceived as unattractive.
• 47:00 - 59:00: Color Preferences Across Cultures The chapter discusses the intersection of art and psychology, emphasizing how art facilitates varied perceptions of the world, prompting reflection on these perceptions. It highlights psychology's interest in how perception is shaped, specifically regarding aesthetics across different cultures.
• 59:00 - 66:00: Relationship Between Music, Color, and Emotion This chapter explores the historical and psychological study of perception, focusing on how individuals perceive the world differently. The text highlights the work of George Stratton, a key figure in perception science in the early 20th century. Stratton was particularly interested in how altered perspectives, such as viewing the world upside down through special glasses, could affect perception, thus contributing significantly to the field of psychology.
• 66:00 - 81:00: Audience Questions and Cultural Influences on Aesthetic Preferences The chapter discusses the historical curiosity of psychologists in altering perception. It introduces a story of an individual experimenting with wearing vision-altering equipment for extended periods, initially resulting in disorientation and nausea, but ultimately leading to adaptation and normalized perception. This serves as a segue into the main discussion topic, where two professors from a specific department will delve deeper into the psychological endeavors and findings related to seeing the world in varying ways.

The Psychology of Aesthetics Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 [Music] my name is Rich Ivory and I'm the uh chair of psychology here and I want to welcome all of you this is uh our inaugural Department Outreach event um so uh there's all sorts of amazing things happening in the department I get to hear about them all the time and we realize that you know of course part of
• 00:30 - 01:00 our mission is to uh share that knowledge with you share those insights that are being gathered up in in Tolman Hall so uh uh we decided that we should start having such events so I'm I'm really pleased to see uh such a turnout I I know it's the uh speakers that have drawn you to this here I just wanted to quickly get a sense um how many of you are alumni of Cal all right we got a lot of bears here and how many of you are alumni of uh of our department
• 01:00 - 01:30 excellent excellent I hope all of you are uh in touch with us and on our mailing list so you can hear about such events uh and we have some undergraduates here too is that right so uh our future alumni and I I see we even had some very short people here who are really future Alum of of of the Bears uh I did want to make sure that you know again we have a signup sheet back there we hope you all stay in touch with the Department we sent out a newsletter earlier this year and we asked you all
• 01:30 - 02:00 to tell us I think the phrasing was what's a cal psychology degree worth or what does it get you we wanted to hear what happens because we we've really done a poor job over the years at figuring out what happens to our undergraduates we we come at the beginning of the year and uh people say they want to be psych majors and then we want to be able to tell them you know what happens to our psych Majors we have 400 of them every year and we know there some go but many of you disappear on us and we want to like collect that information so we can share it with future generations of students so we
• 02:00 - 02:30 have um if you do sign up back there you'll start getting newsletters from us on a twice a year basis and so forth we won't swamp you so you can pick up a copy now and see what you're missing out on and uh if you uh care to join in and sponsoring such events and supporting our educational and Outreach Mission we have cards here that tell you how you can donate to the department and join in on our donation list there so the uh the
• 02:30 - 03:00 topic for tonight we chose was the uh science of Aesthetics or the psychology of Aesthetics and um it seems might seem odd if you're you know wandering around and thinking about what psychologists do to think about such a topic you know the psychology of of Aesthetics and you know your first thought would be well you know how could these guys know anything about it Tolman Hall is the ugliest building on campus and uh um but you know Beauty resides within is all I can can say on on that front um but the second thing is
• 03:00 - 03:30 that really the the study of Aesthetics you might think is something that you'd find in you know obviously an art department or maybe in literature or in cultural studies and so forth uh so what do psychologists have to say about that but art is really you know it seems like it's kind of a way about you know helping people see the world in different ways right and it's about also having us think about the way we see the world and that's really where I think uh uh psychology comes in because psychology's long been interested in the affordances of perception about the many
• 03:30 - 04:00 different ways we see things and so forth so uh uh really thinking about perception has been a long Central problem in Psychology in fact uh the founder of our department is George Stratton and he was one of the great early perception perception scientists in the turn of the 20th century and he was really interested in understanding how the world might look from altered perspectives in fact his most famous experiment was where he put on glasses that turned the world upside down
• 04:00 - 04:30 completely and he left them on for well 21 days the first time and then he went for 8 Days continuous and he was just interested about you know of course when he put him on he stumbled around the world and everything looked he got kind of nauseous but over time suddenly he could see the world in a normal way or he could move about there so again psychologists had this long-standing interest in looking at the world in different ways and that's what I think our speakers are going to be talking about today so our speakers today are two professors from the Department
• 04:30 - 05:00 Archer mamora and Steve Palmer uh they're both amazing scientists and as you've seen now or you'll see afterwards there are wonderful photographers so um both uh uh have taken up photography with a passion really over the last few years and I I became curious as we plann this event to know you know what led them to become interested in the science of Aesthetics was it that they started doing photography and that led them to sort of then think about the Aesthetics side things or did they have an interest
• 05:00 - 05:30 in Aesthetics and that led them to take up the pursuit of psychology I asked both of them and uh they gave kind of different answers and I'll use that as my introduction for the two of them uh art wrote back and said well he was really a dark room jock in high school uh he worked in a camera store and as he put it had a very nice quote he said he put most of his earnings back into the cash register um but then with his career and his kids he kind of set the photography aside for a while I think he said he was limited to just taking
• 05:30 - 06:00 snapshots vacation snapshots of the kids but he renewed his interest for photography and what he called his midlife crisis and he both applied himself to both the technique of Photography but also the history of psychology uh the history of photography and I I really recommend that he's written this amazing piece on the history of Edward mbridge who is really one of the great early 20th century photographers and in this piece art argues that his most inspired work muybridge's most inspired work was
• 06:00 - 06:30 really a consequence of his traumatic brain injury and arts done a really beautiful analysis of that historical of myy Bridge's career from that perspective his interest in Aesthetics though really ratcheted up about 12 years ago when he started offering freshman seminars called the psychology of Art and the way he tells it that he really planned on just giving his sort of personal perspective on memory emotion and so forth the students though claimed it was false advertising and wanted to hear about Aesthetics and so he decided to devote himself to that
• 06:30 - 07:00 topic and he's been teaching that class ever since for the last 12 years Steve on the other other side is really is a late bloomer he got his uh late digital his first digital camera in the early 2000s there and he said he was fascinated by two things the first was that he he just loved the idea that he could take a thousand pictures for free and throw them all away and just keep one okay so so that really appealed to him and the second was that he could really control all parts of the production there from taking the picture
• 07:00 - 07:30 printing the picture playing with it in Photoshop even printing it out on his as he said his fancy in in inkjet printer and even matting doing everything with very simple tools he did this for a while and then he really started you know thinking about why does he like one picture better than the other and he realized basically you know these are the kind of questions that he'd been asking for so many years why do people have preferences for one perspective than another how do why is it that certain shapes appeal to us and so he
• 07:30 - 08:00 decided to really apply his scientific methods to the study of Aesthetics and he'll be talking about that so tonight Art's going to speak first and he's going to give a sort of General perspective on the psychology of Aesthetics uh and then Steve's going to follow and he's going to be taking us kind of on a whirl Whirlwind tour of his discoveries about what colors and compositions about looking at them and trying to understand why people like certain ones and why they don't like others so I'll turn it over to art
• 08:00 - 08:30 great thanks a lot Rich um let me make sure I start so I don't run for about five hours long because I want to do that um well thanks Rich and the particularly the staff for organizing this because it's a wonderful opportunity to show our work both aesthetically and intellectually so this is a great and very unique opportunity for us I think um so I had this poster in in my college dorm room and for the
• 08:30 - 09:00 next 30 Years somewhere in my house um it's mon reg aent and it just was always there to remind me how beautiful this uh painting uh is and some of you know even now I think they they every beginning of every semester they'll have those posters for sale around the spral plaza and and so uh you know it's always picked one up and this was what I always carried with me and I loved it and you know it I I like blue and it had water
• 09:00 - 09:30 and of course you know the the painterly style was just wonderful we all many of us resonate with impressionist paintings of course some of you know that when this painting was first shown it was scorned and vilified people thought well what is this this is not art this is an unfinished crude painting not anything like we saw before and it's an interesting question over aund and so years what's changed right something back then was viewed as ugly and not
• 09:30 - 10:00 even art and now we see beauty and and Aesthetics in something like that so clearly in my mind particularly since I'm interested in memory as in my day job is to study memory it really is knowledge that drives a lot of our appreciation a lot of our Aesthetics right what you have to know aspect we we've seen a lot of different things over the many years and what people in the 19th century knew it was was a certain kind of style and this was way
• 10:00 - 10:30 out just totally out of it so what I like to use it as an example too is something that has changed over time because of our our knowledge and our experience of course it's always interesting with that to think well you know what is art you know I had this wonderful opportunity during my sabatical years a few years ago to spend a year thinking about art and Aesthetics and brains and mind and whenever I would go out to a dinner and people would say well what you're interested I'm interested in art and then we'd start start talking about well what is art and
• 10:30 - 11:00 then it's like talking about politics or religion or something everybody's arguing and having a different ideas to what art is and uh in the next meal that you have just pose that question what do you think art is it's just wonderful um and as many of you know there was a a good time when even photography was not even considered an art right and this is Edward Weston's um nude which um I really admire I think that if if I were to call myself an artist it would be the
• 11:00 - 11:30 school of Edward Weston or his his son Brett and what I think is interesting about his work is that you can look at it and say that's a woman kneeling but I don't think Weston wanted you to think that way he wanted you to look at the lines the curve the shading and this is not unlike what I like to do in my own paintings and to give you an example of why I think that here is another photograph of shells and you know you don't have to be much of a art histori our radiologist to see how similar these
• 11:30 - 12:00 two paintings are not in terms of content but in terms of the lines and the forms and the and and the style and and in some sense I think the beauty right and so in in some ways what even 80 years ago people would denigrate photography as not even being an art it's you know you just have to snap a picture and there it is well of course it's we now appreciate it's more than that it's a point of view and I think you'll see with what the art the photographs that you see here I mean Steve and I have a point of view I think
• 12:00 - 12:30 we it's uncanny I think I like his work because I think his point of view I resonate with that and so but everybody who's an artist would have their own particular way of seeing and photography allows for that kind of of issue now of course uh it it gets even worse when you think about what art is um some of you know this work um which is a Duchamp got a men's urinol from the plumbing store in New York put it on it side put
• 12:30 - 13:00 pseudonym on it and submitted it for an art EX exhibition it was never shown actually it was actually never this is the only evidence of the actual art piece because it was lost and thrown away after it was submitted what you see in very famous museums now are replicas that Duchamp made bought in the 50s signed our mut and now those are worth you know millions of dollars right but it's again it asked the question well
• 13:00 - 13:30 what is art clearly this is Art and it's so interesting um just not that long ago uh there was a survey of art experts 500 art experts they voted this as the most influential modern artwork of all time so surpassing any Picasso any uh matis any Warhol this was viewed as the quintessential most important artwork a urinal right so um and and and and for
• 13:30 - 14:00 good measure in some sense if you're an art historian this actually changed the way we think of what the definition of art is right we now have to say something ugly this was not meant to be beautiful this is sort of dadaist ideas of of trying to poke fun at the beholder Right This was meant to be disgusting and just put up there as an artwork and uh it gets worse right so um here is a uh a piece called
• 14:00 - 14:30 um who's the is there any Franco files who want to translate that for me something of the world it's the base of the world or the pedestal of the world so what manzon did is he put you can see it's upside down here he called the Earth his art piece and this is the pedestal on which the art work so it comes to the point where anything can be art right and so when you ask the question what is art well you know it's kind of a a sort of a BAL question
• 14:30 - 15:00 because anything can be art and so when we want to think about what Aesthetics is we have to sort of say well something is Art so here's my way of sort of Sid stepping the issue I'm calling art anything any object that's intended by an artist we can talk about that at nauseum um for an aesthetic evaluation okay now it beges a question what's Aesthetics right okay um so uh one thing that we can think about what Steve and I
• 15:00 - 15:30 did here when we put these things up is to have you evaluate these photos for some kind of aesthetic evaluation uh and that could be a lot of different things you know you might find um Beauty you might as a Beholder you might experience Beauty in these uh photographs it might generate other kinds of emotions it might just be kind of fun to look at it might make you think as rich said there's a lot of art that makes you think about it all these things are in some sense part of what we
• 15:30 - 16:00 might call Aesthetics and the fun thing about these various experiences they're all in your head right and what's fun for I think Steve and myself is that because their experiences in your head we can talk about the psychology of that right we could try to understand well what is it about your head in your mind and your brain that's driving these experiences and I think for both Steve and myself when we thought about people's reactions to our our work one
• 16:00 - 16:30 might ask the question well how do you study this kind of thing scientifically how do you try to develop a psychology of this kind of response and so we decided at first a first step would be to have others do the work for us uh so we edit a book uh which includes uh chapters from five philosophers five Psych ologists and
• 16:30 - 17:00 five brain scientists to talk about how they would construe a science of Aesthetics whatever that might mean to them and so we had a fun uh opportunity um this is a I think a wonderful mcgr um because I think it it captures this whole notion of connecting Minds brains and experience right so um uh when you look at it um in fact maybe I should ask Ethan when you look at it
• 17:00 - 17:30 I think he's actually falling asleep so maybe I shouldn't ask him when you look at it you have to have knowledge in many different ways to understand what mcgree was doing right I mean for one thing you have to understand that this is an artist who's painting and you have to understand that artists often use models to paint and then you have this is called The Clairvoyant The Clairvoyant right and then you have to understand what eggs
• 17:30 - 18:00 are relationship the birds and all this stuff requires knowledge right and I think what's fun is that what and as many of you know mcgree has all these interesting fun surreal stories where you have to think about the relationships to make the the the painting work and so sort of a a fun way of sort of characterizing what these uh contributors had to do with respect to um thinking about art putting together uh this aesthetic experience and how
• 18:00 - 18:30 minds and brains work to to drive those things um as Rich mention I um had the opportunity to spend time U writing my own book about this stuff so this is um my book will come out um you know in about uh 8 or nine months from now um and it's sort of my own personal perspective uh trying to understand how uh we gain these kind of experiences so here's a sort of a first blush thought about Aesthetics in the next 10 minutes
• 18:30 - 19:00 you can think of our aesthetic experience as a honic response okay what the heck does that mean right so it's very simple honic response means just something you can sort of rate on a scale say minus 10 being you hate it plus it PL plus 10 means you love it and you know what's your your reaction to any of these paintings how do you toate them so that would be a honic response you know in terms of your like or dislike in terms of uh how interesting or uninteresting it is and um for some
• 19:00 - 19:30 evolutionary biologists one way of thinking about it is that you know there are some things stimul that we approach and some things that we avoid and these are all parts of our honic responses they drive interesting things or undering things that are good for us that help us survive things that we better stay away from because we might die all these kinds of things are part and parts of this honic response and I think Aesthetics co-ops all of these kinds of natural responses to our appreciation of
• 19:30 - 20:00 art um and an interesting question is you know how do we make these kinds of judgments and the way I like to constru the the question today is well when you go to an art museum and you walk around what do you do and what kinds of responses do you get when you go uh and look at a particular painting or when you go around looking at these uh photographs what what is it that you're doing and I have a a very straightforward simple way of thinking about it that's seems to help me when I go to a museum and so I'll sort of
• 20:00 - 20:30 provide you this little framework and so we have an artist who has an intention of producing this artwork as I mentioned and we just call that art whatever that anything in the museum we'll call Art except it reminds me of an anecdote that my wife and I went to the Norton Simon Museum one time and saw these lovely contemporary artworks and then we saw this lovely um blue uh very minimalist looking blue strip across it and it turned out to be just some construction part they it was it was like Duck tape and it wasn't at all part of an art
• 20:30 - 21:00 thing so right so but generally whatever you see in a museum we'll call it art um and here's one of my actually one of my favorite painting it's Andrew Wyatt's wind from the sea and so I'll let you look at it while I mention this whole part and the whole part here is that we really want to understand the beholder okay let's say just given something's art now how do we experience that what do we do and I have a very simple way of thinking about it based actually on my 25 years of teaching psych one uh when
• 21:00 - 21:30 you teach psych one you teach various categories of aspects of of um thinking and feeling and uh you divide the chapters into various parts and the three main parts actually uh are are respective of this thing that I call the ice ski model it's an acronym for first and the intention and then these three uh components major components uh the sensory aspects of an artwork the
• 21:30 - 22:00 knowledge aspects which I think very few people really think about and of course the emotional aspects and I again since I study memory I think it's really interesting to think about the emotional uh the memory aspects because it's something that we don't really pay attention to very much uh so to give you an example here you know there's we when you look at this painting it's something that looks very naturalistic right it look you you can tell that it's a window and that is a scene outside the window right uh but you don't appreciate the fact that you're using a lot of
• 22:00 - 22:30 knowledge if you're getting what this picture might be making you feel for example uh you see that the curtains like you know that it's a windy breezy day and you know that the the windows open right and it gives you I think gives me a certain feeling right and so the sensation and knowledge and emotions all get put together to give me some kind of response that says oh I really like this right um and I think what's kind of fun what I've been playing with is is whenever you look in artwork you
• 22:30 - 23:00 can kind of evaluate them on these three major components of the way we we behave uh which is what it looks like how it makes us think the conceptual knowledge aspect of it and how makes you us feel and all of these are working together to drive our aesthetic experience in fact when Steve talks he'll he'll actually I think talk about how all three of these are are sort of integrated together to drive these experiences uh my own little
• 23:00 - 23:30 way of thinking about is that when you get that wow experience when you see an artwor you say wow then my feeling is that they're all jacked all of those parts are jacked up to 11 you know on a scale of 10 and so what we end up doing is is you can find lots of artworks that might jack up your knowledge aspect I think the fountain Dam's Fountain is very important from a conceptual point of view I think it probably does very little for most of us in terms of the sensory and emotional part right but it'll always be very important in ter terms of the conceptual aspects of it
• 23:30 - 24:00 and you can valuate any artwork based on this it's sort of a fun thing for me to do to think about both the knowledge the sensation emotion and I add the intention here because this is a bit controversial for people who know about postmodernism but um I think whenever I see a a a a painting a photograph an artwork I like to know something about the artist I like to try it's almost like a communication it's almost like a little email message from somebody else right it's sort of like you get to see something about that person's psyche and
• 24:00 - 24:30 I think it's very interesting to think about the artist and these days people uh a philosopher these days would say you could forget about the artist we don't really care but I think for us lay people I think it's very important uh for to drive our experience and so uh just to to um you know there's all a whole series of fun things that one can talk about which each of these components I just want to mention this one because I think it's very uh interesting and that is why do why when you look at we look at this we
• 24:30 - 25:00 find beauty and again 19th century viewers found that to be ugly right what is it about that for us we we see lots of aspects probably we've seen dozens of impressionistic paintings and lots of commercials that have abstract modern stuff and this is sort of in our I think sort of sweet spot of what is new and interesting uh and and fun for us but not so way out there that it looks odd or different so interestingly I think
• 25:00 - 25:30 novelty can drive our experiences but you don't want things to be too new right and in fact um there's this U relationship that actually V who's vam V is known as the father of our field uh conceptualize this notion of of how uh our arousal changes our honic response are what's Pleasant or unpleasant and Daniel Berlin who is a um uh psychobiologist Drew upon this curve to talk about how we appreciate art and I
• 25:30 - 26:00 think it's very very telling so think of this as um this line is is our indifference and this is positive numbers more interesting more uh liking negative numbers means it start to to you don't like it right and when you see something that's very familiar that is not at all novel uh you're sort of indifferent to it the newer it gets you start to get some positive honic value but up to a point you know if it's really new you can't conceptualize it
• 26:00 - 26:30 right and so all of a sudden it gets less interesting and can even be when it's really novel way out there you say what the heck is that you know I don't like that at all right and so this helps us understand the fact that you know we can go to to the m d and see these impressionist pain and just love them um and uh we might go to a contemporary art museum and you know you can overhear people saying well gee is that art you know what is that right and they're so new so different that we don't really incorp at that well in our knowledge base what I think is fun about this
• 26:30 - 27:00 story is that this is a a moving uh curve here because what's familiar to you is based on how much you know right the more you know about art the more you know about Modern Art and abstract art the more you can take in things and they won't be so so novel though you'll hit that sweet spot so this curve here is all depending upon what you know the more you know the more you can take in so it allows for a way of thinking about how our knowledge really even influences
• 27:00 - 27:30 our emotions okay lastly just to to bring this U into the uh psychology in general you know we can go beyond this appreciation of of just art we use this honic response whatever we do you know we do it when we decide what products we want to buy right we use it to decide where we want to go and what we want to do uh we uh use it to decide what we want to drink and or eat this is my drug of choice here um and all of these aspects of of our hedonic response is in
• 27:30 - 28:00 some sense related to this aesthetic notion so when we study Aesthetics we're really considering you know many different kinds of of uh basic human drives and emotions and uh allows us a way to actually think about it more generally you know how do why do we like you know this iPhone versus this you know other thing right and so you know there some sort of aesthetic appeal and I think these kinds of aspects try to to help us understand add it um so I just gave you the fluff which is all I know
• 28:00 - 28:30 and now Steve is going to uh provide you with some really um important [Applause] work okay if you want to use the phone is ringing or something or is that your timer that might be my timer okay
• 28:30 - 29:00 let's see there we go okay hi there um thank you all for coming and art actually is just provided a a perfect introduction I guess uh for my talk you'll see there's a little bit of overlap at the end of his talk I say
• 29:00 - 29:30 some of the same things in the beginning of my talk but I didn't know what he was going to say so um yeah I'm going to I'm going to talk more about the sort of sciency aspects of this aesthetic science business to try to convince you that you really can be rigorous about this stuff and discover interesting things uh and uh I'm going to do that from my own um my own perspective as a photographer and as as Rich mentioned uh the beginning of my uh um studies of aesthetic response was
• 29:30 - 30:00 really why is it you this is a although it's kind of dark here but you can see the real one out here someplace uh why is I like this picture so much why do I like this picture better than other pictures when I actually developed this picture as I'll I'll show you shortly how it sort of unfolded you know I liked it better and better as I kept working on it um what is that stuff about um so my plan here is to try to do way way too much that's characteristic of me uh first of all I want to say a
• 30:00 - 30:30 few words about aesthetic science what it is and why it's interesting I'm going to say a little bit about my photography but primarily as a way of just kind of motivating what the topics are that I study scientifically because unlike art my day job now is I'm an aesthetic scientist one of the few in the world who really does this uh for a living although I'm retired I don't know how that in any case uh and then I'm going to
• 30:30 - 31:00 talk about uh some scientific work that we've done on people's uh preferences for different aspects of spatial composition and then uh their preferences for colors and then I'm going to try if I have time to get to this final set of stuff that's new um about the relationship among color music and emotion which is just so much fun that I I really hope I get a chance to to get to it so first of all aesthetic science uh what is that and uh why is it worth studying it's actually very hard
• 31:00 - 31:30 to find a definition a closed form definition this is sort of the one of the better ones the study of the mind and emotions in relation to the sense of beauty the problem is that well what's Beauty um that requires another whole definition and there really aren't any good definitions of of beauty um for me in the talk I'm going to give today uh basically Aesthetics is the study of this particular Dimension experiential Dimension that I believe most if not all humans have which goes from oh wow I
• 31:30 - 32:00 love it at one end to ug yuck I hate it at the other end and it encompasses both ends um it's important because it actually impinges on so many areas of our life and this is just actually a recapitulation of what art said so one obviously is uh paintings we go to the museum we go to art galleries to view things these happen to be some of my particular favorites um and sculpture
• 32:00 - 32:30 also in art museums everybody agrees that that stuff is of some aesthetic value um as art mentioned photography is something that was not once considered to be uh an art object but those are some of my other black and white uh photographs um architecture uh produces aesthetic responses I think these are all quite beautiful buildings and I saw the Taj Mahal just a couple weeks ago uh we go to see movies we like the movies
• 32:30 - 33:00 better when we find them to be aesthetically appealing uh we go shopping and we buy stuff for our houses and we base our choices on aesthetic appeal what goes with what what do I have what looks good um industrial design as art also mentioned uh iPods are really cool partly because they're such aesthetically pleasingly designed um fashion obviously we buy clothes based on which ones uh we think look good and make us look good um and
• 33:00 - 33:30 we even go on vacation to places often that we choose because they are beautiful there should be there should be uh a lot of Aesthetics in websites but I'm not really sure that there are uh when I went to Google and gave a talk about this stuff I tried to find some aesthetically pleasing websites these are some that I came up with one of which of course is mine but uh but there really aren't very many um there's lots of flashing and zooming and
• 33:30 - 34:00 and things to get your attention but that doesn't make them particularly aesthetically appealing in my mind now I want to disabuse you of this idea that you may have that Aesthetics is the same thing as uh art or that the study of Aesthetics is the study of art it's not the case uh for several reasons one of which is just that there are all kinds of aesthetically appealing objects in the world that we uh just don't count as arti objects I mean the flower is an
• 34:00 - 34:30 object it's not an art object if someone paints it if someone takes a picture of it then it's an art object but we have aesthetic responses to the objects themselves and they just aren't art um and similarly as art pointed out uh there's a lot of things that count as art that we don't most people don't find aesthetically appealing at all that is to say they have the ug yuck reaction to them uh rather than the oh wow that's wonderful so it's not the same thing and my talk is not going to be about art it's about Aesthetics and it's about
• 34:30 - 35:00 this dimension of Human Experience from wow I love it to yuck I hate it okay um I want to say a few words about my photography uh most of the things that I have on display here are what I call Watercolor photographs uh there's one in particular that I'm going to talk about it's owned by iring Lee hater I gave it to them for their 50th wedding anniversary um and I'm going to use it to motivate why it is that I decided to study um spatial preferences
• 35:00 - 35:30 and color preferences as the focus of some of my research so the first thing is you got to start with a good picture and um so you you take a picture and actually you know if you you take lots of pictures like like I told uh Rich the wonderful thing about digital photography is you can throw away 99% of them just keep the one that you like this is even darker uh up here than uh it should be but but the point is you you pick out one that you
• 35:30 - 36:00 like best that one is the one that I like best although I actually like the composition of this one a little better but I figured I could crop this down what I like here is I like the light on the vase which is this is the vase is in darkness and and so anyway you pick the one that you like and then and then I improve its spatial composition so you crop it that's the original picture uh you find that portion of it that you think works best and then you crop it um and then I improve the color composition so uh this uh well first of all colors
• 36:00 - 36:30 on projectors are not the same as the colors that things actually are so take it from me uh this is not a good representation but but the original photograph was sort of too greenish and kind of drab so the first thing I did was to warm it up it doesn't look very warm here um and then I made some further selective adjustments so I made the uh blue painting back made it Bluer and the vase Bluer also um and I actually kind of popped although you
• 36:30 - 37:00 can't see it here some of the red uh Hues in the uh Quint blossoms and then I actually made these watercolor adjustments using something called the watercolor filter in Photoshop um now if you just use the watercolor filter straight you almost can never tell the difference between the original and the filtered one so what I actually do is I actually shrink the photo down until it's a very low resolution photograph then I apply the watercolor filter then I blow it back up
• 37:00 - 37:30 and then I have to do some things to get rid of digital artifacts but what it does is this is a closeup here oops a closeup here so that you can see that uh this is the photograph and it has sort of photographic kinds of qualities and there's something different going on here in terms of the texture it's much more waterc colory and I urge you to take a look at the actual photograph I can't remember the actual image there um but this gives you the the sort of the reasons the ways in which uh spatial
• 37:30 - 38:00 composition and color composition and texture which I've not yet started to study but is on my list um how they actually work in terms of the way that I do my um photography so now comes the the science how is it that I've tried to study this scientifically using the techniques of uh visual psychophysics um my credentials I really am a vision scientist I I wrote the
• 38:00 - 38:30 book this little pamphlet uh I wrote in came out in 1999 and it's uh it's sort of the Bible of the field so I'm using the techniques for classical vision science but the object of study now is people's aesthetic response rather than how red is something or or how close is something or how big is something so here's the kind of task that we do uh which of these two pictures do you prefer how many people like the one on the left raise your
• 38:30 - 39:00 hand how many people like the one on the right raise your hand W interesting audience usually this is about a 90% of the people like the one on the left which is actually the one that Whistler painted um but with this is the kind of task we give people uh usually people have a pretty clear reaction they like one better than the other and and nobody has yet said what do you mean which one do I like better so we're tapping into something that's real so in the first
• 39:00 - 39:30 study we wanted to ask psychophysically about spatial composition where if there's a single object in the picture where should it be um so we took a bunch of objects flowers and and dogs and cars and so forth and we showed it from a a front view a right facing View and a left facing View and then we just moved it to a bunch of different positions and we showed people every possible pair and for each pair they said which one they like better and it turns out people give you very very regular responses to this
• 39:30 - 40:00 sort of thing and here's what they are so we're plotting here now how much people like the that object when it's in the far left to Center to far right position and it turns out it matters how the object is facing so if the object is facing forward you get a very strong Center bias people like these objects all of which were themselves symmetrical to be squarely in the center of the uh frame now this actually contradicts the
• 40:00 - 40:30 so-called rule of thirds how many people have heard the rule of thirds yes so the rule of thirds is wrong at least in terms of what it is that people actually like um it's wrong in a lot of different ways although I think it's fistic useful but if it's a forward- facing object people tend to like it to be in the center uh however if it's a right facing object they like it to be on the left hand side of the frame and if it's a facing to the left they like it to be on the right uh side of the frame which we
• 40:30 - 41:00 call the inward bias that people like the object to be sort of facing into the frame rather than out of the frame with more space in front of it than behind it and this is not just true of these funky little um objects the pictures that we show people we've looked into uh the Corell uh database of stock photographs for single object pictures and we classify them in terms of whether they're left facing right facing or forward facing and then we measure where the centers of these objects are and it
• 41:00 - 41:30 turns out that we find pretty much the same thing we found before that the front-facing ones are kind of smack dab in the center the ones that are facing to the right tend to be on the left side of the frame and the ones that are facing to the left tend to be on the right side of the frame then we started to study vertical position so where up and down should people find uh Place objects to be aesthetically pleasing we started out uh looking at these bowls at different levels at different heights in the
• 41:30 - 42:00 picture plane and uh we again are measuring preference by having you know showing people pairs of these things say which one do you like better um and looking at the probability that they they choose those and it turns out for the bowl that there's a lower bias people like the bowl to be below the center of the frame and we thought that was kind of interesting although we weren't necessarily expecting it and then we thought well what if we showed them something like say a light fixture um and did the same experiment where we find the same things no we don't we find
• 42:00 - 42:30 there's an upper bias that people like the light fixture to be above the center of the frame um and so what we've got here is kind of an analog maybe of the inward bias that that there's vertical facing this that the top of the bowl is sort of the area that people interact with the where the affordances are and the bottom of the light fixture is where the action is and so forth and you want those parts to be closer to the center of the frame and there's another uh Factor that's involved here which is
• 42:30 - 43:00 where they are relative to your gaze uh light fixtures are generally above uh your Straight Ahead gaze and and bowls tend to be below your Straight Ahead gaze and it turns out that that's another factor that matters if you want to put an eagle a flying eagle in a photograph you want to put it above the center because Eagles are generally Flying Eagles anyway or generally above you dead dead Eagles are probably below you in any case um just to rip through this there's another a bunch of other
• 43:00 - 43:30 things that matter in terms of spatial composition uh one is the perspective from which you show objects there's some old research that ellar rash and I did uh back in the 80s on what was called canonical perspective showing that there's certain perspective views from objects of objects that are more easily recognizable and it turns out that those same object perspectives are actually preferred aesthetically as well and since then it's been discovered that there's something called canonical size so if you take a single
• 43:30 - 44:00 object like a say butterfly which is a relatively small object and you put it in a frame and you ask people you know for every possible pair of these things which picture they like better it turns out that they like the um the butterfly to be smaller in the frame than say an elephant so these are the results of this experiment we've got animals from butterflies to elephants and we've got artifacts from keys to uh trailers car
• 44:00 - 44:30 trailers and uh we look at how big the people like that to be in the frame and the bigger the object the bigger they like the image of the object to be okay and and this is true even if even if the subject only sees the butterflies and and another subject only sees the elephants where you do it uh completely between subjects uh this is an experiment that we're in the process of doing about the influence of of motion and here we're sort of pitting it against uh the the
• 44:30 - 45:00 stuff about facing so you can this is a someone doing a backward dive so they're facing One Direction and they're moving in the opposite direction uh and one they're facing Inward and moving outward the other one they're facing outward and moving Inward and uh we find that by and large people tend to like the one where the motion is the driving force but they both matter you don't get the same pattern for the two cases and if you have a person who's diving forward and facing forward you actually have a much bigger bias toward the side than if
• 45:00 - 45:30 they're one of these where they're conflicting that's experiments those are experiments that we've just kind of completed the ink is not yet dry okay so that's kind of a whirlwind tour of some of these uh spatial compositional effects um and I should say uh people always want to know whether this has like influenced by photography and and the answer is no it really hasn't because uh the scientific knowledge is so way far behind people's aesthetic sense the aesthetic
• 45:30 - 46:00 sensibility of artist that it's not even funny um it's like we're back in the Stone Age In terms of trying to understand what's going on with these things uh whereas the artist is using their intuitions and if they're a good artist then then people seem to resonate it and and enjoy it okay I want to turn now to color preferences um uh we have studied uh 32 different colors we call them the Berkeley color project colors this is work I've done
• 46:00 - 46:30 with Karen schlass who's in the audience um and what we do is produce the most saturated versions of these eight Hues that we can uh the eight Hues include uh sort of um perceptual Primitives of red green blue and yellow as well as their um combinations purple this is supposed to be purple orange uh chartreuse and cyan like a I said I have no control over really what these colors look like
• 46:30 - 47:00 on the on the projector um but we look at these eight Hues at four different cuts we call them one is the saturated Cuts where saturated means Vivid we've got another cut for The Pastels the light colors the dark colors and the muted colors all right and that makes up these 32 colors and for each of these colors we have subjects come in and look at a big square of that color and make a rating how much you like it from not at all to very much by moving a cursor along this
• 47:00 - 47:30 uh line so if say you're going to judge that particular blue color you move the cursor over here if you like it a whole lot as most people tend to um so what do we find when we do these experiments uh so here we've got the different Hues red orange yellow chartreuse green cyan blue and purple and we've got a preference rating here um and for the light colors and the muted colors we find pretty much the
• 47:30 - 48:00 same thing this is with American uh Bay Area people people tend to like the cool colors better than the warm colors there's a kind of blip here at yellow which as I'll say later maybe a Berkeley artifact um and if you look at the saturated colors it's basically the same story you like the cool better than the warm but everything's elevated people at least in America tend to like saturated colors better than the light or muted colors but things get very interesting when you
• 48:00 - 48:30 look at the dark colors because the curve becomes very different and in particular relative to the sort of Baseline of these muted and and light colors people really hate dark yellow dark yellow is kind of a greenish Brown I call this color yucky poo um they tend not to like dark orange which is brown but they tend to like dark green and they tend to like dark red so it's not just that people don't like dark colors they're particular dark colors that they
• 48:30 - 49:00 they don't like and for reasons I'm not going to go into this makes it very difficult to tell a story that's based on sort of physiology like what kind of cones we've got or what kind of um opponent process cells there are in the lgn or whatever because you wouldn't expect this sort of interaction with the the darkness so we started talking about this this uh ecological story why do you like the colors and and that you like and not the other ones well you like saturated blue cuz it's a color of clear sky and you like dark red because of the
• 49:00 - 49:30 color of ripe fruit and dark green because it's healthy vegetation and you don't like these brownish colors because it's like rotting food and vomit I could have done worse believe me with these P um so this is just a just so story I'm I've sort of cherry-picked examples uh but in fact what Karen and I did was to create this this ecological veilance
• 49:30 - 50:00 Theory it's really simple it's kind of like a one sentence Theory it says people like colors to the degree that they like the objects that are strongly associated with those colors the objects that are characteristically those colors and correspondingly they dislike colors to degree they dislike the objects that are those colors but how do you test this it's a it's a bear but we figured out a way so bear with me here uh there's going to be there's a complicated experiment but I think you'll get the gist of it so we have one group of subjects come in and they do
• 50:00 - 50:30 exactly what I've already told you about they see each of these colors individually and they make a rating about how much they like that color all right then we get another bunch of subjects in and we show them the same set of 32 colors but we asked them to list all of the objects that they can think of that are that color that are characteristically that color so they might say for this particular cyan they might say swimming pool tropical Ocean or fish tank Etc then we have another group of subjects who come in and we give them these
• 50:30 - 51:00 descriptions that have been given by the people from group two sort of categorized so we asked them well how much do you like tropical oceans we don't say anything about color we just how much do you like tropical oceans how much do you like vomit how much do you like baby poo uh and so forth they make these ratings and then finally for sort of technical reasons we ask people another group of subjects to say how similar is this color to the color of tropical oceans and the reason we have
• 51:00 - 51:30 to do that is because you know people say anything in a psychology experiment and you know they might say that cherry tomatoes are this color and you know that's not true so you have to want to have some way of of getting rid of that stuff so then what we do is we compute this thing called The Wave which is stands for the weighted eff of veilance estimate and this is the this is the uh guts of it so for this color this saturated cyan we've got all these uh all of these categories of objects that
• 51:30 - 52:00 people have claimed are this color and we've got uh measurements of how well these descript these objects match that color and we've also and and some of them are pretty good like swimming pool has a very high rating and Forest has a pretty low rating um and then we've got the valences how much people like this is the honic response that Art's talking about how much do you like forests and swimming pools and seafoam and so forth and then we just multiply these things
• 52:00 - 52:30 together uh that gives us the weighted uh valences of each of these objects and we just take the average of those so this is how much you should like saturated cyan based on all the objects that people could think of and listed that are saturated cyan that are this color okay and um I'll skip that and what do the results look like well these are the data that we're trying to account for these are the the actual preferences that people have that I showed you before and that's what the data the
• 52:30 - 53:00 waves are that's what those calculations are and it turns out that the correlation between these two things is 089 which is staggeringly high uh and it accounts for 80% of the variance with no estimated parameters it's all arithmetic you just do the experiment you multiply them you add them up you divide by in and that's what that's what the number that's what the wave is for that color and it turns out we've done this like two or three times and we always come out with essentially the same result somewhere around 85 to 90% of the
• 53:00 - 53:30 variance is accounted for by by these data we actually did this experiment to show that it wasn't true that this was not a good theory and it just knocked my socks off when we looked at the results um there are lots of differences there are gender differences there are cultural differences I'm not going to have time to talk about them I'll show you uh these are data from the us Japan Serbia and Mexico four places where we've we've uh collected these things
• 53:30 - 54:00 with calibrated monitors and so forth I just want to show you uh two things or a couple things one is that there seem to be two universals here one is everybody loves saturated so far every people in every culture have loved saturated blue and on average people in every culture have hated yucky poo um not to say not to say that every single person has liked blue and hated yucky poo but on average across people that's true there interesting differences like why is it the Japanese
• 54:00 - 54:30 don't like dark red when everyone else does or why is it that the Japanese and and Americans like uh pastel cool colors whereas in Serbia and Mexico they don't I'm not going to get into that I do want to tell you about one other result here uh uh because the the theory doesn't just say that you're going to like colors that are sort of associated with objects it should be also true if you're associated with like social institutions so so um people who are positively invested in some color associated social
• 54:30 - 55:00 institution should like those colors better than people who are negatively invested so you can think about gangs right so if you're a member of the Bloods you're going to like red and you're going to hate blue and if you're a member of crypts you're going to love blue and hate red we decided not to bring in the gang members but we did the next best thing we studied Cal versus Stanford students and and looked at how much they liked uh the Cal versus Stanford colors
• 55:00 - 55:30 and we also asked them to make a rating of of how much school spirit they had on a flot fiveo scale and I'm not going to just going to show you a couple of results here one of them is that this is for the color pairs that in every that in every case the predictions are correct that that uh Berkeley students like Berkeley uh pair is better than Stanford this is uh gold on blue and and and blue on gold whereas for the Stanford students is the opposite for that that Stanford students like red on white and white on red better than
• 55:30 - 56:00 Berkeley students do moreover the more school spirit you have the more that's true okay so so this is obviously a learned effect unless you believe that people are sort of predestined from birth to go to Stanford and Berkeley depending on what colors they like and not only what colors they like but what colors they dislike cuz they have to go to a school where their rival has those colors I can consider that wildly imp
• 56:00 - 56:30 implausible um okay so all right I'm already over so the question is do you want to hear anything about color music and emotion all right this is so much fun uh so this started as a project in an undergraduate uh seminar where students have to do uh a a an Empirical research project a a novel Empirical research project and and the idea was to try to study not with but with regular people whether there were not whether there systematic relationships between
• 56:30 - 57:00 colors and music and so what we did was we showed people our whole array of 37 colors and at the same time we had we had them listen to music and while they were listening to the music we had them pick the five colors that went best with the music and the five colors that went worst with the music so I'm going to try here I hopefully you'll be able to hear the music um if I bend this around so in each with each of these composers whoops
• 57:00 - 57:30 with each of these composers we have a a slow a medium and a fast tempo and a major and minor mode now they're different for different POS composers you know bronze never gets as fast as Bach nor does Bach ever get as slow as brumms for example but but there is variation in all of these so let's play uh some uh Let's do let's do fast Mozart major
• 57:30 - 58:00 [Applause] I think think about think about which colors you would pick if you had to pick which colors go with this music which ones would you pick this got to be the flakiest task that I have ever studied in fact this is the flakiest task I have ever heard of anybody study but I'm going to show you there's some remarkably systematic results all right just for comparison let's do keep the composer
• 58:00 - 58:30 the same Mozart minor [Music] slow which colors would you pick to go best with this same ones n all right so we had people do that task and um in addition to that we also had them do two other related tasks because we
• 58:30 - 59:00 thought that the connection between color and music actually might be mediated by emotion so we showed people each of the same colors individually and we had them rate each of those colors in terms of these eight different emotional terms so say take this whoa that's supposed to be bright yellow it's actually kind of uh chartreuse but anyway how happy is this color how Lively how calm how strong how sad how dreary blah blah blah they made eight
• 59:00 - 59:30 different ratings on one of those line Mark rating scales so we have for each color what its sort of emotional associations are and we did the same thing for the music we had people so let's play some brumms here okay so we get did I not get it [Music]
• 59:30 - 60:00 first movement fourth Symphony really Lively isn't it okay so let's try um so some major Broms major fast Broms it's not as Zippy as uh Mozart but you get the idea good deal good deal faster
• 60:00 - 60:30 and uh definitely major okay so what do we find well here what we've done here is just we had 48 subjects we've just shown you the color that each of the 48 subjects picked as being the color that went best with this music and and unfortunately you can't this is it's not a very good rendition of the color because they're not bright enough but but um basically what you find is that
• 60:30 - 61:00 people pick darker cooler less saturated less Vivid colors to go with the slow this is the bach oh we haven't heard the boach yet so this [Music] oops so you see there are some blacks in there and some dark Grays and dark blues and things like that whereas when you get to the
• 61:00 - 61:30 um the fast major bar the colors you get these should all look like bright yellow but of course they don't and um it looks like there's some black in there but there isn't so one way of describing the results as I said in terms of the differences in the colors and the sort of appearance qualities of the colors but but we can also talk about the emotional associations of those colors and what we find is that these are the
• 61:30 - 62:00 sadder drearier weaker colors and these are the happier livelier stronger colors so what we did was we went back to look at the relationship between the happy sadness of the emotional response to the music and the happy versus sadness of the colors that people pick to go with it all right and what do those data look like they look like that now that's the highest correlation that I've ever seen in my research except for
• 62:00 - 62:30 lively [Laughter] dreary and strong weak is no slouch the the outlier here is angry calm where the uh correlation is only 089 so like I said this is like the flakiest thing I've ever done and I've never seen correlations like that and I I lay awake for a while worrying that this was actually somehow it couldn't
• 62:30 - 63:00 come out any other way because there was a flaw in the design but I now know that it can come out other ways because we've done some experiments some follow-up experiments that are much more selective um and in fact sometimes the correlations are relatively low only 6 but we take this as being evidenced that in fact this this crossmodal matching between uh colors and and music is in fact driven by emotional content people listen to the music they have an emotional response or we say evaluate
• 63:00 - 63:30 the emotional content I mean I think they're actually having emotional responses uh and then you pick the colors that go with those emotional responses uh where this is going is um toward the Fantasia fantasy the we're expanding this now to a much more General thing about the relationship between music and visual Dimensions where we're looking not only at uh we're looking at the relationship among things like Harmony uh Melody tamber Dynamics
• 63:30 - 64:00 and music with with colors and shapes and textures and motion and all of this stuff how could you produce an algorithm that would create aesthetically pleasing visual displays to go with music the qualities of which you can hopefully compute uh online I'm hoping to get Google interested in in in doing this or something um but that's where that's where we're headed I want to thank my collaborators here particularly Karen schla who's in the uh audience and
• 64:00 - 64:30 Jonathan sartino formerly Jonathan Gardner who's not here but was uh was equally um helpful in developing the spatial uh composition portion of the uh project I also want to thank my sponsors um which include Amy's Natural and organic foods um it's the research is currently sponsored by the National Science Foundation and a bit by Google but when we started this stuff out nobody's going to give money to study
• 64:30 - 65:00 this kind of stuff until you've actually got half of the research done finally I got NSF interested in it um but uh before that we got support from Amy's Natural and organic foods uh Karen's Uncle works in the works for Amy and he's uh actually in charge of marketing I think and he gave us about $3,000 worth of pizza coupons and we paid our subject with pizza coupons now there's actually a relevant
• 65:00 - 65:30 message here uh which is that actually funding research on Aesthetics of this sort is not an easy thing to get funding for it kind of Falls between two chairs uh there's lots of money there's lots of money from foundations for real science and they don't believe that Aesthetics can be real science and there's other money that's out there for the Humanities to support artists and photographers and writers and things like that but neither of these groups are particularly interested in funding
• 65:30 - 66:00 research like this so if anybody out there in the audience happens to have some extra money that they're looking to uh get rid of to support the uh aesthetic science the the beginnings of aesthetic science um please talk to Rich and uh he'd be glad to to take your checks I also want to thank you for your attention and interest [Applause]
• 66:00 - 66:30 well thanks to the uh Foods there for getting this started um so uh before we take a break we thought um to have some refreshments uh both Steve and art are uh willing to entertain questions from the floor uh since they are taping this though I'll I'll be the one walking around the microphone and hand it to people and they can ask either or both of our speakers uh whatever you whatever you want to know about the science of
• 66:30 - 67:00 Aesthetics you mentioned that a lot of your studies had to do hang not you mentioned your studies uh or your subjects were in Berkeley but you also alluded to possible differences in other cultures and I was wondering if you had actually gotten a chance to to study other cultures and to see um if
• 67:00 - 67:30 what the differences were in terms of color Aesthetics between say American and other cultures or if there was a difference oh there are differences I you didn't probably get it but I sort of flashed up there uh a slide that had data from the US Japan Serbia and Mexico we're hoping to get data from India which I just came back from and uh now from China as well there are very uh substantial differences between cultures
• 67:30 - 68:00 the only thing that we've really found that's truly common is that everybody likes saturated blue and nobody likes yucky poo um but the the FR there's sort of two two pieces to the my answer to the question one of them is that the ecological veilance Theory actually makes predictions that uh I mean the the objects that are available to people in say uh China to some degree are similar to ours but others are different and
• 68:00 - 68:30 that um say in Japan for example nobody uh everybody mentions to Tomy mats for a sort of light beige color no one in the US has ever mentioned to Tommy mats to my knowledge uh and so they're different objects and and there may be very different kinds of uh uh emotional responses uh to the same objects in different cultures so for example they may love eel in Japan and we don't like eels because they love to eat them and we don't even think about eating them
• 68:30 - 69:00 they're these slimy uh ugly things in the sea so the ecological veillance Theory actually makes a kind of interesting prediction that is if you do this the wave experiment where you get people to list all the objects and rate all the valences of all the objects and do that stuff that the American wave should predict the American data uh preference data better than the American wave should predict the Japanese preference data and vice versa and that's true okay that's the only place where we've so far looked at that now I
• 69:00 - 69:30 don't think that that's all that's going on um because in part because the uh percentage of variance that's accounted for by th those wave data is substantially lower in Japan than it is here I think a piece of what the difference is is that um what I'm going to call sort of symbolic uh color associations are are much stronger in Japan uh and other cultures such as China and India those are the the reasons why I want to go look there so
• 69:30 - 70:00 if you go to China I mean there's this particular red that they um uh temp U not temples but uh um the culturally important artifacts are in which is supposed to be a good fortune good luck kind of color and and there's a imperial yellow which is a particular yellow that's associated with uh the emperor and there green I think is supposed to associated with long life and these are very potent associations I believe and
• 70:00 - 70:30 I'm not an anthropologist this is just from sort of talking to people and going around and seeing things and my guess is that um in other cultures those kinds of effects may be a good deal uh more important than they are in our Melting Pot they may have kind of uh been washed out so to speak but we're going to look at that and it's studi you can do the wave experiment we're going to do it is not just with objects but also have people list for each of the colors all of the sort of abstract Concepts that they can think of that are associated
• 70:30 - 71:00 with that color and you can say well how much do you like Purity um how much do you like evil how much do you like uh Good Fortune how much do you like long life and and and then we can integrate those with the objects and the the hope is that those kinds of associations will in fact bump up the percentage of variance accounted for in those cultures where those sorts of things are important so there are cultural differences we think that they we know
• 71:00 - 71:30 that there are uh portions of those differences that can be accounted for by this ecological veillance kind of uh framework for objects but we think there other parts that need require these other kinds of associations including things like religions uh you know Muslim religion is associated with particular Green Jewish religion with a particular blue uh saffron with Buddhists and so forth um holidays you know red and green with Christmas uh purple and yellow with
• 71:30 - 72:00 Easter maybe or you know so all those things are potentially relevant do you think there are any synesthetic uh effects you in our Aesthetics in general well for Cate certainly there are um I don't know how to think about the relationship between synesthesia and the kind of stuff that I do is it is it so I mean the difference is that cetes really have a sensory experience of say
• 72:00 - 72:30 colors when they're listening to music and if you've seen um The Soloist uh that's a nice representation there's a scene there where uh he the The Soloist goes to uh hear a concert and then and the aesthe the the um special effects people you know could go wild with you know creating something that what might be what might be in his mind um I don't have those kinds of experiences and yet I have all of these
• 72:30 - 73:00 associations so um is it a Continuum I don't know I don't really know enough about synesthesia proper to know whether the same kinds of dimensional relationships uh hold for them as for us it's something that we want to look into um so most people I think don't have that kind of synesthesia but there may be a sort of conceptual level at which we do um I have a question for art I think on the
• 73:00 - 73:30 knowledge um hey Art I okay so how come I go into a museum and I get pretty excited about the more contemporary or impressionist art and I look at the older portraits and just kind of think I'm impressed but kind of unattached to that art but then the pyramids or something
• 73:30 - 74:00 completely I think for me I I you know as I've learned in the last five or six years more about art I have been able to take in and appreciate more I I used to just walk through most of the you know medieval and Renaissance stuff and and you know started to to focus on Impressions now um I because of what I know I think I've I I've opened my eyes to lots of different things when I for example when I go to uh the medieval
• 74:00 - 74:30 section I had this game I play and that I'm really interested in how they create a naturalistic scene because during as many of you know from the Renaissance to the medieval times they actually learned how to do linear perspective they actually actually learned how to do the geometry necessary and you can look at artists and play a game of of the sensory part and see what did they know and how much shading did they know sometimes they look cartoony so I have lots of fun going through lots of different sections now I have to admit that an art historian like my wife will
• 74:30 - 75:00 spend more time on stuff that I could spend about five milliseconds on um for example some of you might have have seen the um the exhibit uh from uh at the um the Young on the Venetian um artists and they're mainly portraits and they're just a bunch of old geezers portraits and they're not interesting at all for me um Helen SP spends about 20 minutes on each fraking portrait um partly because of knowledge because what's
• 75:00 - 75:30 important is that person so if you know history you see that person you want to see the representations you want you want to look at the clothing to see how it represents culture you know you want to do all these things that you know you know I certainly don't care about so you know it's all it again it's just knowledge you know the more you know the more I think you can appreciate a lot of different things I didn't I would go into a contemporary Museum five years ago and and spend five minutes in a museum now I find a lot of things that I
• 75:30 - 76:00 I really do find interesting from a more from a conceptual basis but it's all I think it's partly you know that part I think is is that knowledge so you know the more you learn the the more fun things uh are available to you I think I have a question actually for either or both I wonder if you find gender differences or you expect to find gender differen in response to
• 76:00 - 76:30 Art well of course I can't say anything about art uh I can say something about gender differences in aesthetic response to color uh because that's something we've actually looked at and uh yeah we do find uh gender differences um I even have a slide of it I think in here somewhere um basically what it boils down to is I we were expecting that there would probably be um some differences in uh gender
• 76:30 - 77:00 differences in Hue but we actually didn't find any the differences were really in uh the response to different what we called Cuts so here it is here's the slide uh so um this is the average overall all the cuts with males and females and it's basically they're just lying right on top of each other but if you if you sort
• 77:00 - 77:30 of uh separated out by these different cuts you find that males like saturated colors more than females do and females like muted colors more than males do and this kind of surprised me I don't know whether it surprises you or not because if you think about the kind of colors that people wear myself not myself accepted by and large women seem to wear more saturated colors than men do and men tend to see wear more muted colors but if you think about who they're dressing for it makes
• 77:30 - 78:00 sense so the men like more saturated colors so the women wear them and vice versa uh there's a way to test this you look at gay men and gay women and then and find out whether gay men tend to wear the colors that men tend to like and the gay women tend to wear the muted colors that the women like we haven't done that study yet but it's a it's a prediction um there are other differences in other cultures okay so in Japan there's a pretty big difference between uh males and females in terms of
• 78:00 - 78:30 how much they like the sort of light pastel colors uh women the Japanese women love pastel colors Japanese men not so much they probably like them more than American men do because you know their wives and girlfriends do but but uh there's a big difference there which doesn't show up in the US and in Serbia there's a hue difference which is that basically Serbian men hate all shades of
• 78:30 - 79:00 purple I suspect that this may be a sort of developmentally de delayed version of of of uh sort of adolescent males uh view about pinks and purples that you don't want to like those colors those are girly colors as our our former Governor would say um but yeah so there are differences there are gender differences they differ across cultures uh it would be interesting to see whether the ecological veillance Theory can account for that I mean maybe the reason that
• 79:00 - 79:30 they uh the males like dislike these colors is because they're the colors of like baby dolls or whatever I don't know did you ever do this study with kids okay I'm sorry this is sort of this the question was do we do we ever do this study with kids we're just starting now to do this with infants okay um and with infants of course you you can't say how much do you like this color what you do is you put two colors up there and then you measure how long the baby
• 79:30 - 80:00 spends looking at each of the colors and you presume that the one that they they like better the one that they look at longer this is work in collaboration with Anna Franklin who's a developmental psychologist uh from England now at Su no formerly at Sur now at Sussex and what we're finding we just sort of got the First Data out now we looked at that the sort of interaction between the dark colors and the muted colors essentially or the light colors the dark
• 80:00 - 80:30 colors and the light colors and what we find is that it's very different from adults I should say previously the data from infants looked like the data from adults in the sense that uh they tend to look more at the blues than at the the cool colors and the warm colors um but those were all with saturated colors when we look with the dark versus light colors we find this inversion that for example yucky poo is one of the baby's favorite [Music]
• 80:30 - 81:00 colors and they also tend to like light red which uh adults and they're not so fond of Satur of the of uh dark blue or Blues in general we think what might be going on speaking from an ecological veillance perspective that they like the light red colors because it's the color of lips Mommy's lips and they may like the the dark yellow color because it's close to the color of Mommy's nipp so we want to do some sort of intervention studies looking at things like well if you give a if you give a
• 81:00 - 81:30 little kid a toy that is one color and and they play with it and things like that from a pre-test to a post- test do their color preferences change do they like the color better after they've had this experience with the toy um we've done some experiments kind of like that with undergraduates uh and it does work you can change people's color preferences by giving them experience with things uh in one experiment we just actually showed them U biased sets of
• 81:30 - 82:00 pictures so we sort of reminded them of all the good red stuff and the bad green stuff for one group and that group from a pre to post test in terms of how much they like the colors the preference for Reds went up and the preference for greens went down the other group gets we sort of show them pictures that are biased they remind them of the bad the good green stuff and the bad red stuff so that's like forest and trees and and vers and Kiwis versus uh versus Blood and Guts and and Gore and those the red
• 82:00 - 82:30 goes up and the and the sorry the green goes up and the red goes down so you get this nice crossover interaction which is just what you would predict so you can push these things around with experience um our current belief is that although although the initial motivation for this Theory this eological veence the is kind of evolutionary uh we don't really believe anymore that there's very much of a sort of innate component to it because the baby data are turning out very differently the cultural differences are turning out to be
• 82:30 - 83:00 substantial um but the basic idea as art actually mentioned is that color preferences are like food preferences that it's a it's a biological steering mechanism that in food you tend to like things that are sweet and fatty because they've got calories and they tend not to be poisonous you tend things to not like things that are like sour and bitter because they're more likely to be toxic and they're less likely to have food value so if you follow your preferences you'll eat the good stuff and not the bad stuff well just
• 83:00 - 83:30 generalize that to color if there's a correlation between colors and good stuff and colors and bad stuff if you go toward the goods the stuff that looks good in terms of the colors that it is you're going to be and avoid the stuff that's bad colors you're going to be better off and happier I should say you know I I I meant to say this in the beginning that uh I think we really underestimate the import of Aesthetics in in life in part because we live in a free Society with all of these choices
• 83:30 - 84:00 you can listen to any kind of music that you want to you just turn on the radio or you put in your in your uh CD player the music you want to hear suppose that someone forced you to listen to music that you hated all the time would you be a happy camper I wouldn't suppose somebody forced you to live in in a a house that was painted in colors you hated would you be a happy camper I don't think so nobody's ever studied it's not really very ethical to study these things but I think that uh I think that those things are are important and
• 84:00 - 84:30 there really probably are health and happiness consequences of of Aesthetics that are not uh yet well appreciated yes my my question is Sim similar to the last one about are there age differences not just between babies and adults but within yeah there are we haven't studied them but some other people have uh in particular in in of around pubescence there's a difference between that shows up between boys and girls in terms of how much they like
• 84:30 - 85:00 pink and purple for example it's kind of like the Serbian men that uh and I think it's because there's a there's a gender differentiation that goes on pretty powerfully there uh socially and the boys are trying to be more masculine and the girls more feminine and and so the boys don't want to be associated with the colors that are are culturally associated with femin it and and so forth so yeah that the there was a there was a theory around for a while that
• 85:00 - 85:30 basically was pushing the idea that that the sort of uh red pink thing that was sort of like innate biologically driven but the evidence I'd say now is that that just ain't so it's cultural well um join me in thanking art and Steve for great and um we have a uh very warm red wine
• 85:30 - 86:00 back there uh that is just the right color I think and and some white too so uh uh why don't you join us then and we can continue with some questions and discussion so thanks for all coming out [Applause] oh