Attraction Based on 'Ease' of Mental Processing

Experiments published in the current issue of Psychological Science show that attractiveness depends upon the ease of mental processing a given object has on the brain.

Using random-dot patterns and common geometric patterns, researchers first "prepared" participants to receive a particular prototype then asked them to categorize patterns of varying resemblance. After categorizing a pattern, participants were then asked to rate its attractiveness.

Results showed that the closer patterns resembled the prototype, the less time they took to categorize. More interestingly, the less time it took to categorize a pattern, the more attractive participants found it.

Says study author Piotr Winkielman of the University of California, San Diego:

"What you like is a function of what your mind has been trained on...A stimulus becomes attractive if it falls into the average of what you've seen and is therefore simple for your brain to process. In our experiments, we show that we can make an arbitrary pattern likeable just by preparing the mind to recognize it quickly."

ABSTRACT: Prototypes Are Attractive Because They Are Easy on the Mind