Details of Research Outputs

Starting with Birkhoff's (1933) proposal of monotonic inverse relationship between aesthetic preference and the complexity, extensive research has been conducted to modify and expand this equation by considering other factors to account for the large individual difference in aesthetic experiences. This study revisits this issue and reveals that Chinese ink paintings are appreciated equally regardless of complexity, while European oil paintings are generally perceived as more appealing when they have greater image complexity. Additionally, not only extrinsic factors of the artwork itself, but also viewers' intrinsic spatial information processing capacity play crucial roles in accounting for variations in aesthetic bias toward complex visual elements when viewing landscape paintings. We propose that the fundamental spatial information processing ability may exert implicit yet significant influences on human aesthetic appreciation of landscape artworks, which are independent of semantic and cultural factors.