Mark Berman

There's a lot of really interesting stimulation in Times Square that automatically captures involuntary attention, but it sort of captures all of your attentional resources.

You can't really mind wander or think about other things when you're in Times Square.

And Steve and Rachel thought that that kind of stimulation is not really going to be able to rest our directed attention abilities, that it might actually fatigue us even further.

There are certain simulation in the environment that our brains process more fluently, that it's just easier to process certain stimulation.

And that's also kind of related to soft fascination, that softly fascinating stimulation might also be sort of easier to process.

But what does that really mean?

And so we've started to try to quantify what it means for different stimulation to be processed more fluently or more easily.

And it seems like that seems to be occurring more for natural images versus urban images.

That's right.

That's right.

Versus in the urban environment, you might actually be cataloging all the different objects, you know, that there's a Volkswagen Beetle, a bicycle, you know, Gothic architecture.

And, you know, we're just labeling and quantifying all of that information, which is taking up more room.

Whereas what you're saying, when you're looking at that tree, you're compressing that representation to just be a tree.

and not to, you know, something that's got 5,000 little extra parts for every single leaf.

Well, it's interesting that natural settings tend to have more curved edges.

You know, if you imagine a tree, a tree's got curvy branches, tend to have curvy leaves.

An ocean, the waves are curvy.

The coastline is curvy.

So nature is filled with curved edges.

And one thing that we found in our research is that people really like images that have more curved edges, even built images.