The sweet spot of seeing: A categorization-based account of visual aesthetic pleasure

Aesthetic pleasure is shaped by many visual attributes, including prototypicality, fluency, complexity, symmetry, and self-relevance, but it is unclear why such diverse factors all influence liking. I propose that a major component of visual aesthetic pleasure is an epiphenomenon of categorization in the visual system, constrained by the metabolic cost of neural activity. In this view, successfully recognizing a stimulus as a member of a category is intrinsically rewarding because it supports perception, generalization, and planning, and aesthetic pleasure partly reflects the summed effect of many local rewards for successful categorization across the visual hierarchy. At the same time, neural activity costs energy, so that strongly driven, cluttered, or statistically extreme displays incur costs that can make them aversive even when they are easily interpretable. The "sweet spot of seeing" (3S) model formalizes visual pleasure as a compromise between categorization-based reward and metabolic expense. It offers a unifying explanation for prototype effects, fluency and mere exposure, mid-level regularities such as symmetry and good continuation, and visual discomfort. The model links classic inverted-U relations between complexity and liking to a concrete trade-off between information and cost, and it makes specific predictions for how aesthetic preferences change due to expertise or fatigue. While integrating recent evidence that lower-cost representations in categorization-trained neural networks and human visual cortex predict higher aesthetic ratings, the 3S model leaves room for later, reflective, self-relevant, and culturally informed forms of aesthetic experience that recruit broader neural systems.