Beauty is literally easy on the eyes

Via Science Daily via Corpus Mmothra

Beauty And The Brain

The phrase “easy on the eyes” may hit closer to the mark than we suspected.
Experiments led by Piotr Winkielman, of the University of California, San Diego, and published in the current issue of Psychological Science, suggest that judgments of attractiveness depend on mental processing ease, or being “easy on the mind.”
“What you like is a function of what your mind has been trained on,” Winkielman said. “A stimulus becomes attractive if it falls into the average of what you’ve seen and is therefore simple for your brain to process. In our experiments, we show that we can make an arbitrary pattern likeable just by preparing the mind to recognize it quickly.”

…

“It seems you don’t need to postulate an unconscious calculator of mate value or any other ‘programmed-brain’ argument to explain why prototypical images are more attractive,” Winkielman said. “The mental mechanism appears to be extremely simple: facilitate processing of certain objects and they ring a louder bell.

“This parsimonious explanation,” he said, “accounts for cultural differences in beauty — and historical differences in beauty as well — because beauty basically depends on what you’ve been exposed to and what is therefore easy on your mind.”

Read the full article