Effects of visual diet on color perception and aesthetics

To what extent are perception and aesthetics shaped by low-level statistical regularities of our visual environments, and on what time scales? We characterized the chromatic statistics of the ‘visual diets’ of people living in remote rainforest and urban environments, by randomly sampling images using calibrated head-mounted cameras as participants went about daily lives. All environments, as is typical for natural scenes, had chromatic distributions with most variance along a roughly blue-yellow axis, but the extent of this bias differed across locations. If color perception and aesthetics are calibrated to the visual environments in which participants are currently immersed, variation in the extent of the bias in scene statistics should have a corresponding impact on perception and aesthetic judgements. To test this, we measured color discrimination and preferences for distributions of color for people living in the different environments. Group differences in the extent of blue-yellow bias in color discrimination were in the opposite direction to that predicted by the differences in scene statistics under an efficient coding framework, but were consistent with perceptual learning in local environments. Preferences for color distributions aligned with scene statistics, but not specifically to local environments, and one group preferred color distributions along an unnatural color axis orthogonal to that dominant in natural scenes. These preferences could be explained by an interaction of culture and perceptual fluency. Our study shows the benefits of conducting psychophysics with people at remote locations for understanding the commonalities and diversity in human perception.