Aesthetic experience is influenced by causality in biological movements

Author(s): Chen, Yi-Chia; Pollick, Frank; Lu, Hongjing | Abstract: People watching is a ubiquitous component of human activities. An important aspect of such activities is the aesthetic experience that arises naturally from seeing how elegant people move their bodies in performing different actions. What makes some body movements look better than others? We examined how visual processing contributes to the aesthetics experience from seeing actions, using point-light “creatures” generated by spatially scrambling locations of a point-light walker’s joints. Observers rated how aesthetically pleasing and lifelike each creature looked in a video of the creature moving from left to right. They viewed four kinds of creatures: The joints’ trajectories were either from an upright walker (thus exhibiting gravitational acceleration) or an inverted walker (thus defying gravity) and were either congruent to the direction of global body displacements or incongruent (as in the moonwalk). Observers gave both higher aesthetic and animacy ratings for creatures with upright versus inverted trajectories, and congruent versus incongruent movements. Moreover, after regressing out the influence of animacy, the creatures that move in a natural causal manner (in accordance with gravity and their body displacements) were still preferred. The subtle differences between different kinds of creatures suggest a role of automatic perceptual mechanisms in these preferences. Thus, while our thinking minds may enjoy watching the magical moonwalk, our automatic minds, with a taste for causality, may curtail the impression of its visual beauty.

• Publication year

  2021

• Venue

  Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

• Publication date

  2021-09-27

• Fields of study

  Biology, Computer Science, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1167/jov.21.9.1916
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

• Physically Implied Surfaces

  2021cited by this paper
• Understanding the visual perception of awkward body movements: How interactions go awry

  2020cited by this paper
• Representational gravity: Empirical findings and theoretical implications

  2019cited by this paper
• Causal Action: A Fundamental Constraint on Perception and Inference About Body Movements

  2017cited by this paper
• Effects of Implied Motion and Facing Direction on Positional Preferences in Single-Object Pictures

  2017cited by this paper
• Curiosity-Driven Exploration by Self-Supervised Prediction

  2017cited by this paper
• The Gap Between Aesthetic Science and Aesthetic Experience

  2017cited by this paper
• Affective responses to dance.

  2016cited by this paper
• Beauty Requires Thought.

  2016cited by this paper
• The stream of experience when watching artistic movies. Dynamic aesthetic effects revealed by the Continuous Evaluation Procedure (CEP)

  2015cited by this paper
• Integrating body movement into attractiveness research

  2015cited by this paper
• The first time ever I saw your feet: inversion effect in newborns' sensitivity to biological motion.

  2014cited by this paper
• High heels as supernormal stimuli: How wearing high heels affects judgements of female attractiveness

  2013cited by this paper
• Simulation as an engine of physical scene understanding

  2013cited by this paper
• Dance as a subject for empirical aesthetics.

  2013cited by this paper
• A biological motion toolbox for reading, displaying, and manipulating motion capture data in research settings.

  2013cited by this paper
• Physical and Biological Constraints Govern Perceived Animacy of Scrambled Human Forms

  2013cited by this paper
• A neural mechanism for aesthetic experience

  2012cited by this paper
• Signature Movements Lead to Efficient Search for Threatening Actions

  2012cited by this paper
• Cosmetics as a Feature of the Extended Human Phenotype: Modulation of the Perception of Biologically Important Facial Signals

  2011cited by this paper
• Putting reward in art: A tentative prediction error account of visual art

  2011cited by this paper
• The Impact of Aesthetic Evaluation and Physical Ability on Dance Perception

  2011cited by this paper
• Effect of motion smoothness on brain activity while observing a dance: An fMRI study using a humanoid robot

  2010cited by this paper
• Moving the Eye of the Beholder

  2010cited by this paper
• Extrastriate body area underlies aesthetic evaluation of body stimuli

  2010cited by this paper
• The Perception Is...

  2009cited by this paper
• A predisposition for biological motion in the newborn baby

  2008cited by this paper
• Perception of animacy and direction from local biological motion signals.

  2008cited by this paper
• Short-term mating strategies and attraction to masculinity in point-light walkers

  2008cited by this paper
• Beauty is in the eye of the plastic surgeon: Waist–hip ratio (WHR) and women’s attractiveness

  2007cited by this paper
• The Inversion Effect in Biological Motion Perception: Evidence for a “Life Detector”?

  2006cited by this paper
• The evolutionary psychology of facial beauty.

  2006cited by this paper
• Physical attractiveness and health in Western societies: a review.

  2005cited by this paper
• Processing Fluency and Aesthetic Pleasure: Is Beauty in the Perceiver's Processing Experience?

  2004cited by this paper
• Incidental processing of biological motion.

  2004cited by this paper
• A model of aesthetic appreciation and aesthetic judgments.

  2004cited by this paper
• The hedonic marking of processing fluency: Implications for evaluative judgment

  2003cited by this paper
• Representing Motion in a Static Image: Constraints and Parallels in Art, Science, and Popular Culture

  2002cited by this paper
• Predictive coding in the visual cortex: a functional interpretation of some extra-classical receptive-field effects.

  1999cited by this paper
• Adaptive significance of female physical attractiveness: role of waist-to-hip ratio.

  1993cited by this paper
• Is the Top Object Adequately Supported by the Bottom Object? Young Infants' Understanding of Support Relations

  1990cited by this paper
• Attractive Faces Are Only Average

  1990cited by this paper
• [First time].

  1984cited by this paper

• No citing papers are available for this paper.