Symmetry in Nature: Fundamental Fact or Human Bias? | LiveScience

DURING THE EARLY PART OF THE 20TH CENTURY, the famous Harvard mathematician George David Birkhoff developed a mathematical formula which he believed could be used to gauge how beautiful and appealing a work of art was.

Birkhoff's formula relied on two abstract concepts: complexity and order (or symmetry). According to Birkhoff, if something is complex, it will be more appealing if it is less symmetrical. Alternatively, if something is highly-symmetrical, it is better if it is less complex.

The formula seemed to make sense in theory, but there was one major problem: how to measure complexity and symmetry? Birkhoff claimed there was a way to do this, but his methods were too subjective for most people's tastes and his formula was soon forgotten.

Read more: Symmetry in Nature: Fundamental Fact or Human Bias? | LiveScience

Autistic people have better perception of symmetry: study - CTV News

MONTREAL — A new study offers a unique glimpse into the mind of autistic people, suggesting they perceive symmetry better than those who are not autistic.

While most people might look at a butterfly and admire its general beauty, for instance, an autistic person might focus on the fact the left wing is a mirror image of the right wing.

Armando Bertone thinks this difference in perception is linked to the well-known symptoms of autism -- such as fixation on specific objects.

Read more: Autistic people have better perception of symmetry: study - CTV News

Gestalt principles of form perception by Mads Soegaard

Gestalt psychology attempts to understand psychological phenomena by viewing them as organised and structured wholes rather than the sum of their constituent parts. Thus, Gestalt psychology dissociates itself from the more 'elementistic'/reductionistic/decompositional approaches to psychology like structuralism (with its tendency to analyse mental processes into elementary sensations) and it accentuates concepts like emergent properties, holism, and context.
In the 30javascript:void(0)s and 40s Gestalt psychology was applied to visual perception, most notably by Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, and Kurt Koffka who founded the so-called gestalt approaches to form perception. Their aim was to investigate the global and holistic processes involved in perceiving structure in the environment (e.g. Sternberg 1996). More specifically, they tried to explain human perception of groups of objects and how we perceive parts of objects and form whole objects on the basis of these. The investigations in this subject crystallised into "the gestalt laws of perceptual organization." Some of these laws, which are often cited in the HCI or interaction design community, are as follows....

Read more: Gestalt principles of form perception by Mads Soegaard