Visual Perception

An early application of fractals to psychology is found in Cutting and Garvin. Subjects were presented with images of fractal curves of different dimensions and levels of generation, and asked to rate the visual complexity of the images on a scale of 1-10. For example, below we see the first three levels (arranged vertically) in the construction of two different fractal curves, the left with fractal dimension 1.47, the right with 1.37. The experiment showed that the fractal dimension and the level of generation together contributed substantially to the perceived complexity, and among the images generated to the highest level used, the fractal dimension is the strongest predictor. Since fractals occur throughout the natural world, it seems reasonable that the dimension should correlate well with visual complexity.