Mark Berman

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.

So images of architectural scenes that don't have any nature in them

If the architecture has more curved edges, people tend to like that architecture more.

Yeah, so if we imagine a snowflake, the snowflake has a characteristic shape.

If we put that snowflake under a microscope and zoom in, you'll also see some of the same shape.

And if you zoom in some more, you also see the same shape.

So that it doesn't really matter what spatial scale you look at the snowflake,