Beauty isn't special: Comparing the information capacity of beauty and other sensory judgments.

ABSTRACT: Information theory (bits) allows comparing beauty judgment to perceptual judgment on the same absolute scale. In one of the most influential articles in psychology, Miller (1956) found that classifying a stimulus into one of eight or more categories of the attribute transmits roughly 2.6 bits of information. That corresponds to 7 ± 2 categories. This number is both remarkably small and highly conserved across attributes and sensory modalities. This appears to be a signature of one-dimensional perceptual judgment. We wondered whether beauty can break this limit. Beauty judgments matter and play a key role in many of our real-life decisions, large and small. Mutual information is how much information about one variable can be obtained from observing another. We measured the mutual informatio

SUBMITTER: Pombo M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10337797 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature