Aesthetic appeal is no coincidence: Preference for generic over specific viewpoints

Generic viewpoints produce images where the visible elements, and their spatial relationships, are largely preserved with small alterations in viewpoint. In contrast, specific viewpoints result from the observer being in a special position relative to the scene, causing spatial alignments between elements that are readily broken with a change in viewpoint. It has been proposed that generic viewpoints are aesthetically more pleasing, due to their lack of suspicious spatial coincidences. We investigated this idea for cartoon foreground and background objects, and found images where foreground and background objects were not suspiciously aligned were judged to be more appealing. A similar, albeit weaker, effect was seen when we digitally manipulated a Monet painting that contained a prominent spatial alignment between a foreground and a background object: the appeal of the painting increased with the magnitude of an introduced spatial offset. A further experiment on an independent observer group found a strong preference for generic viewpoints when tested on a range of cartoon images featuring foregrounds and backgrounds. Our results provide empirical support for the idea that suspicious spatial coincidences between foreground and background objects reduces the aesthetic appeal of images.