Tandra Ghose (Univ. of Kasierslautern, Germany), in collaboration with Frouke Hermens (Univ. of Aberdeen, U.K.) and Johan Wagemans (Univ. of Leuven, Belgium)

Funded by European Union Marie Curie Career Integration Grant

Project No. 293901

Many psychological aspects have evolved to serve a specific function for better adapting the organism to its environment (functional view) and overtime the organisms start preferring/liking those aspects that helps them more to achieve a goal. Now, why is it that some spatial layouts look more visually pleasing to us than others (spatial aesthetics)? Is that because we can extract more 'useful' information for those layouts? Is it easier to "see" important details in more aesthetically pleasing layouts? Is that ease reflected in the pattern of EM? Based on a thorough study of goodness-rating and EM can me make inferences about our "liking" of a scene based simply on EM patterns?

Objective: Correlations between PO-aesthetics and functional ease of EM

• A descriptive study of eye-movement pattern in visual search tasks for targets located on the axes of symmetry of rectangular frames vs. other locations within rectangular frames. (work in progress)
• Development of correlations measures between performance on visual search tasks, the ease of navigating information within a rectangular frame (as measured by eye-movement scan paths and points of fixations on the displays) and the measure of aesthetic-appeal of such displays (as measured by goodness-ratings). (work in progress)