Overview
- PNAS Nexus reports that images estimated to impose lower metabolic cost were liked more during rapid visual judgments.
- A pretrained VGG19 model analyzing 4,914 images produced metabolic proxies that inversely correlated with human liking, whereas a randomly initialized model showed no such pattern.
- Online participants (n=1,118) provided quick aesthetic ratings that aligned with the model’s low-cost preference profile.
- fMRI in a small subsample (n=4) revealed inverse relationships between BOLD signals and liking in early visual cortex (V1, V2, V4) and in higher-level regions (FFA, OPA, PPA).
- The authors stress that the effect reflects first impressions and highlight limitations, including the small imaging sample and the need to further validate model-based energy estimates.