Abstract
Imagine that you are at an art museum, making a judgment about how good a painting looks. What factors would contribute to your judgment? Whereas previous investigations of visual preferences have focused on the arrangement of elements within frames, here we asked about the influence of *extra-frame* factors. In Experiments 1a and 1b, we asked whether the orientation of a square frame with respect to its surroundings influences ‘goodness of fit’ ratings for single dots placed within it. In both experiments, in the unrotated condition, observers gave relatively higher ratings to compositions in which the dot was positioned near the square’s vertical symmetry axis. However, in the 45°-rotated condition (which looked like a diamond), observers now rated relatively highly compositions in which the dot was positioned near the diamond’s vertical symmetry axis. These results suggest that the relationship between a frame and its surroundings dramatically changes which of its internal symmetry axes plays the greatest role in determining visual preference judgments — but an alternative explanation is that observers simply preferred to see dots placed along the egocentric midline. We ruled this possibility out in Experiments 2a and 2b, which investigated the effects of another contextual manipulation — an additional ‘accentuating’ dot placed just outside one of the square’s corners. In both experiments, in the unaccentuated condition, observers again gave relatively higher ratings to compositions in which the dot was positioned near the square’s vertical symmetry axis. However, in conditions with an accentuating dot outside one of the square’s corners, there was a marked shift, such that observers now rated relatively highly compositions in which the dot was positioned near the symmetry axis bisecting the accentuated corner. These results collectively demonstrate that, in order to understand visual preferences for dots within a frame, one needs to think outside the box.