What Makes Textures Beautiful? Effects of Shared Orientation

Texture patterns are widely used in the decorative and fine arts but their formal aesthetic properties have not been studied. In 2 experiments participants were asked to rate the perceived beauty of square texture arrays made up of oriented line segments. In Experiment 1 these patterns consisted of vertical, horizontal (cardinal), and diagonally (+/- 45 degrees) oriented line segments. There were 4 conditions with only 1 of these orientations, with all possible pairs and triplets, and with all 4 together. Patterns with greater collinearity and fewer orientations were preferred. Oblique orientations were generally liked more than cardinal orientations with the exception of vertical and horizontal in combination. In Experiment 2 we used less common orientations located at the midpoints between those used in the first study, preserving their relative orientations while changing their description relative to the upright. Observers again preferred arrays with fewer orientations. Our viewers seem to like patterns through which the eye can travel unimpeded, what we dub as "flow-through." Several features including collinearity, symmetry, and simplicity help to explain the data and are associated with the processing fluency model. Although there is an advantage to evaluating cardinal orientations in wide variety of perceptual tasks, this result does not seem to apply to aesthetic judgments in textures where more emergent phenomena are at work.