The processing of color preference in the brain

Decades of research has established that humans have preferences for some colors (e.g., blue) and a dislike of others (e.g., dark chartreuse), with preference varying systematically with variation in hue (e.g., Hurlbert & Owen, 2015). Here, we used functional MRI to investigate why humans have likes and dislikes for simple patches of color, and to understand the neural basis of preference, aesthetics and value judgements more generally. We looked for correlations of a behavioural measure of color preference with the blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) response when participants performed an irrelevant orientation judgement task on colored squares. A whole brain analysis found a significant correlation between BOLD activity and color preference in the posterior midline cortex (PMC), centred on the precuneus but extending into the adjacent posterior cingulate and cuneus. These results demonstrate that brain activity is modulated by color preference, even when such preferences are irrelevant to the ongoing task the participants are engaged. They also suggest that color preferences automatically influence our processing of the visual world. Interestingly, the effect in the PMC overlaps with regions identified in neuroimaging studies of preference and value judgements of other types of stimuli. Therefore, our findings extends this literature to show that the PMC is related to automatic encoding of subjective value even for basic visual features such as color

Monochrome males and colorful females:do gender and age influence the color and content of drawings?

Influences of educational level and gender were examined through free drawings. A total of 216 participants were recruited ranging from nursery school to university students. Using an adaptation of Turgeon’s methodology, participants were given a standardized set of colored pens and asked to draw a picture. Pictures were analyzed for the area of the page covered, colors used, number of colors used, and content. Overall, females covered more of the page, and used more colors than males. Females drew significantly more sky, flowers/trees and buildings (in most cases houses), and males drew more people and vehicles. In relation to educational level, nursery children used fewer colors than the other groups and secondary school children used more colors than primary school children. It was concluded that gender differences in content, and color, of drawings exist and these differences remain stable into adulthood. Results are discussed in terms of social and evolutionary theory

A new and efficient intelligent collaboration scheme for fashion design

Technology-mediated collaboration process has been extensively studied for over a decade. Most applications with collaboration concepts reported in the literature focus on enhancing efficiency and effectiveness of the decision-making processes in objective and well-structured workflows. However, relatively few previous studies have investigated the applications of collaboration schemes to problems with subjective and unstructured nature. In this paper, we explore a new intelligent collaboration scheme for fashion design which, by nature, relies heavily on human judgment and creativity. Techniques such as multicriteria decision making, fuzzy logic, and artificial neural network (ANN) models are employed. Industrial data sets are used for the analysis. Our experimental results suggest that the proposed scheme exhibits significant improvement over the traditional method in terms of the time–cost effectiveness, and a company interview with design professionals has confirmed its effectiveness and significance

Evidence for surprise minimization over value maximization in choice behavior

Classical economic models are predicated on the idea that the ultimate aim of choice is to maximize utility or reward. In contrast, an alternative perspective highlights the fact that adaptive behavior requires agents' to model their environment and minimize surprise about the states they frequent. We propose that choice behavior can be more accurately accounted for by surprise minimization compared to reward or utility maximization alone. Minimizing surprise makes a prediction at variance with expected utility models; namely, that in addition to attaining valuable states, agents attempt to maximize the entropy over outcomes and thus 'keep their options open'. We tested this prediction using a simple binary choice paradigm and show that human decision-making is better explained by surprise minimization compared to utility maximization. Furthermore, we replicated this entropy-seeking behavior in a control task with no explicit utilities. These findings highlight a limitation of purely economic motivations in explaining choice behavior and instead emphasize the importance of belief-based motivations

Enlightened Romanticism: Mary Gartside’s colour theory in the age of Moses Harris, Goethe and George Field

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the work of Mary Gartside, a British female colour theorist, active in London between 1781 and 1808. She published three books between 1805 and 1808. In chronological and intellectual terms Gartside can cautiously be regarded an exemplary link between Moses Harris, who published a short but important theory of colour in the second half of the eighteenth century, and J.W. von Goethe’s highly influential Zur Farbenlehre, published in Germany in 1810. Gartside’s colour theory was published privately under the disguise of a traditional water colouring manual, illustrated with stunning abstract colour blots (see example above). Until well into the twentieth century, she remained the only woman known to have published a theory of colour. In contrast to Goethe and other colour theorists in the late 18th and early 19th century Gartside was less inclined to follow the anti-Newtonian attitudes of the Romantic movement

Fractal Dimensions in Perceptual Color Space: A Comparison Study Using Jackson Pollock's Art

The fractal dimensions of color-specific paint patterns in various Jackson Pollock paintings are calculated using a filtering process which models perceptual response to color differences (\Lab color space). The advantage of the \Lab space filtering method over traditional RGB spaces is that the former is a perceptually-uniform (metric) space, leading to a more consistent definition of ``perceptually different'' colors. It is determined that the RGB filtering method underestimates the perceived fractal dimension of lighter colored patterns but not of darker ones, if the same selection criteria is applied to each. Implications of the findings to Fechner's 'Principle of the Aesthetic Middle' and Berlyne's work on perception of complexity are discussed.Comment: 21 pp LaTeX; two postscript figure