Advances in visual diversity and entropy

Abstract

Visual diversity is an important component of contemporary environmental design. Current issues on visual diversity include (a) how to measure it?, (b) what is the function between visual diversity and pleasure?, and (c) is the function between visual diversity and pleasure the same for different kinds of stimuli? Data are reported from twenty experiments covering 1126 stimuli and 1027 participants. The concept of statistical entropy is proposed as a measure of visual diversity. The correlation of ratings of visual diversity and entropy for environmental scenes was r = 0.87. Tenable relationships between pleasure and entropy for visual stimuli include linear and asymptotic but not the inverted U function. The type of stimulus strongly mediates the relationship between pleasure and entropy. Results from simple laboratory stimuli do not generalize to environmental scenes and, even within environmental scenes, the relationship between pleasure and entropy is positive for some types of scenes but negative for other types of scenes.