Behavioral Investigation of Visual Appearance Assessment

Abstract

The way people judge, assess and express appearance they perceive can dramatically vary from person to person. The objective of this study is to identify the research hypotheses and outline directions for the future work based on the tasks observers perform. The eventual goal is to understand how people perceive, judge, and assess appearance, and what are the factors impacting their assessments. A series of interviews were conducted in uncontrolled conditions where observers were asked to describe the appearance of the physical objects and to complete simple visual tasks, like ranking objects by their gloss or translucency. The interviews were filmed with the consent of the participants and the videos were subsequently analyzed. The analysis of the data has shown that while there are cross-individual differences and similarities, surface coarseness, shape, and dye mixture have significant effect on translucency and gloss perception.