The Effects of Novelty and Familiarity on Beauty Perception

In order to investigate how novelty and familiarity affect beauty perception, fractal images were presented five times over 14 weeks. Fractal images are unfamiliar to people, hence used in this study to control their previous experience. a total of 800 fractal images were divided into five groups (160 images X 5 group), and three groups of images were presented to participants each time for five times. The results showed that while beauty perception is decreased until the third exposure, it is increased from third to fifth exposure. These results suggest that a certain level of repeated exposure is necessary for subjects to become familiar, which in turn affect beauty perception.