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Google Tech Talks May 22, 2007 ABSTRACT Artists and graphic designers of all stripes continually face the problem of how to compose their works in aesthetically pleasing ways. Despite its importance and generality, the perceptual basis of aesthetic response has not been adequately studied. I will report the results of three projects that investigate people's aesthetic responses to spatial and color composition. Our results show strong, consistent preferences in the spatial composition of simple images containing familiar objects and configurations of objects in rectangular frames to be positioned at or near the center of the frame (the "center bias") and to face toward the center of the frame (the "inward bias"). Related experiments on people's judgments of the "goodness of fit" for probe shapes (e.g., circles and triangles) at various positions and orientations within a rectangular frame also support the center bias and inward bias, with striking evidence for the role of symmetry and balance in spatial composition. In the color domain, preferences for color combinations are well predicted by people's rated preference for the individual colors and for their ratings of the harmony of the pair. Moreover, people agree strongly about the degree to which pairs of colors are "harmonious," although they may disagree about how much they like harmonious versus disharmonious colors. Contradicting many color theorists in the art world, color harmony appears to be primarily based on perceived color similarity, such that colors of the same hue, but different brightnesses and saturations, are experienced as highly harmonious. The results show that "aesthetic science" is a new and exciting topic within cognitive science that can shed new light on the nature of our appreciation of the visual world.