Liking of Art and the Perception of Color

Color has been a defining feature of paintings throughout art history. Despite the great diversity in the use of color between epochs, there are some surprisingly stable and unifying features in chromatic properties across visual artworks. For example, artists' palettes seem to be biased toward the yellow-red range of the spectrum. Here, we assess the impact of a holistic color manipulation (i.e., rotating the color gamut) on aesthetic liking and perceived colorfulness of abstract paintings. We presented 6 versions each of 100 abstract artworks that differed only in the rotational degree of their color gamut within the CIELAB space. Results indicated a very stable preference for the original color compositions-both on a participant level and on an item level. Furthermore, participants perceived original color compositions as more colorful than rotated versions. This effect remained robust even when the exact number of different colors-among other chromatic features-was taken into account in covariate analyses. Thus, it seems that original color compositions are inherently special. Specifically, it seems that the aesthetic appeal of original artworks arises from nontrivial color features, which are characterized by their distribution within the visible spectrum. We assume that the rotation manipulation may change the perception of some colors more strongly than others due to differences in sensitivity of our visual system to these hues. We discuss these findings with respect to category-specific color perception, which may be a potential contender for a neurobiological foundation of the observed effects. Public Significance StatementHuman viewers are surprisingly good at spotting color changes of artistic color compositions. It is still unclear which color characteristics they use for this ability. We systematically manipulated the color of abstract artworks and measured its effect on participants' preferences and perception of colorfulness. We used abstract art because it does not contain any objects that are associated with particular colors. First, we found a systematic shift of artistic original palettes into the yellow-orange color range. Further, participants preferred original artistic palettes, as well as perceiving them as more colorful than manipulated artworks. Even slight changes in the color makeup out of this yellow-orange hue range was connected to decreased liking and colorfulness. Our study provides further evidence that the composition of