ArticlePeerJ2019
Symmetry preference in shapes, faces, flowers and landscapes.
Article in PeerJ, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Visual Harmony and Complexity Shape Subjective Judgments More than Detectable Overt Attention: Evidence from Eye-Tracking and Facial Coding.Journal of eye movement research · 2026Article
- Visual features explain dynamic aesthetic experiences across distinct movie content.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- From pixels to perception: A benchmark for human-like symmetry detection.Vision research · 2026Article
- Does Your Hat Speak Your Mind? Personality Traits and Aesthetic Preferences for Hats Among Italian Young Adults.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- The Minimum Semantic Content (MSC) Dataset: A Large, Balanced Resource for Computational Aesthetics Research.Scientific data · 2026Article
- Unveiling the relationship between aesthetic experiences and attention through a cross-experiment validation of their processing biomarkers.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- A Kinetic Ecological Approach to Beauty Perception: A Perspective Review on the Case of Symmetry and the Golden Ratio.The European journal of neuroscience · 2025Review
- Surface neatness as an index of aesthetic value of everyday objects.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Exploring the complex information processes underlying plant behavior.Plant signaling & behavior · 2024Review
- Social groups and polarization of aesthetic values from symmetry and complexity.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Evolution of Human Brain Left-Right Asymmetry: Old Genes with New Functions.Molecular biology and evolution · 2023Article
- Encoding specificity instead of online integration of real-world spatial regularities for objects in working memory.Journal of vision · 2022Article
- Swipes and Saves: A Taxonomy of Factors Influencing Aesthetic Assessments and Perceived Beauty of Mobile Phone Photographs.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Review
- I know what i like when i see it: Likability is distinct from pleasantness since early stages of multimodal emotion evaluation.PloS one · 2022Article
- Article
- The extrastriate symmetry response can be elicited by flowers and landscapes as well as abstract shapes.Journal of vision · 2020Article
- Preference for symmetry, balance, or proximity in picture aesthetics depends on the method of evaluation.i-PerceptionArticle
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Most people like symmetry, and symmetry has been extensively used in visual art and architecture. In this study, we compared preference for images of abstract and familiar objects in the original format or when containing perfect bilateral symmetry. We created pairs of images for different categories: male faces, female faces, polygons, smoothed version of the polygons, flowers, and landscapes. This design allows us to compare symmetry preference in different domains. Each observer saw all categories randomly interleaved but saw only one of the two images in a pair. After recording preference, we recorded a rating of how salient the symmetry was for each image, and measured how quickly observers could decide which of the two images in a pair was symmetrical. Results reveal a general preference for symmetry in the case of shapes and faces. For landscapes, natural (no perfect symmetry) images were preferred. Correlations with judgments of saliency were present but generally low, and for landscapes the salience of symmetry was negatively related to preference. However, even within the category where symmetry was not liked (landscapes), the separate analysis of original and modified stimuli showed an interesting pattern: Salience of symmetry was correlated positively (artificial) or negatively (original) with preference, suggesting different effects of symmetry within the same class of stimuli based on context and categorization.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.