Abstract
Background: It has been reported that when observers were asked to select the preferred one among original and hue-rotated art paintings, they preferred the original paintings although they have never seen them before (Kondo et al., 2017; Nakauchi et al., VSS2018). This study aims to explore the robustness of this “original-preferred judgement” for art paintings by recruiting a large number of participants with broad age groups. Method: 4-AFC paradigm was used to measure the preference for art paintings. Participants (n=30,777: male=16,837, female=13,940; mean age=46.6, S.D.=15.4, ranging from 15 to 97 years old; only Japanese participants) were asked to select the most preferable one among four images: original (0 deg) and three hue-rotated images (90, 180 and 270 deg) with the same luminance and mean chromaticity as the original. Art paintings used in the experiment were collected from the genres of abstract, flower, poster, still life and symbolic. Results and Discussions: Original paintings were selected as most preferable (44.12 % among four choices) and the original-selection rate was significantly correlated with color statistics of art paintings (e.g. skewness of a*, correlation of L*-b*), duplicating previous findings (Nakauchi et al., VSS2018). Furthermore, the large-scale subjects in this experiment enabled us to analyze more precisely the distribution of the original-selection rate of observers. We found that center of the original-selection rate distribution (mean, median and mode) increased with the advance of age, meaning that the originals were selected with higher probability as people get older. This finding strongly implies that the original-preference judgement for art paintings is acquired not only during school age in the educational environment as shown in the previous report investigating children of 6-to-12 years old (Imura et al., ECVP2018), but it should be concluded that it might be continuously happen across the human life-span.
Acknowledgement: This work was supported by NTTDATA Institute of Management Consulting, Inc. for recruiting observers and data collection, and by KAKENHI (No.15H05922 and No.18KK0280).