with Stephen E. Palmer (UC Berkeley)
Webpage designers, photographers, painters and other visual artists are faced with questions of how to position objects within a frame so that their composition is aesthetically pleasing and objects of interest are easier to detect. Aesthetic judgments of spatial layout have been described by positive feelings (e.g.,“Wow! I love it”) and negative feelings (e.g., “Ugh! I hate it”) and it has been reported that certain spatial layouts are preferred more than others within a rectangular frame (Palmer, Gardener & Wickens, 2008).
More on spatial aesthetics from Palmer-lab (UC Berkeley)
Experimental results by Palmer and Guidi (2008) using a “goodness of fit” rating task show that the structural skeleton of a rectangular frame are the preferred location with the center being the most potent location (the point of intersection of its vertical and horizontal axis of symmetry).
Figure-1: Goodness of fit rating inside a rectangular frame (Palmer & Guidi, 2008)
The goal of this project is to study the accuracy and speed of visual search tasks for Gabors chains that are placed in different locations within a frame. For example, how do performance in search tasks compate when the Gabor chain is placed along the axes of symmetry in a square/rectangular frames (see Figure-2A ) compared to other postions (see Figure-2B ).
