Yi Lin

The intricate interplay between visual art, aesthetic appreciation, and human cognition has long captivated artists and scientists. One difficulty of this line of research is that artworks differ on many dimensions that influence aesthetic appreciation. While trying to keep the out-of-scope dimensions constant is a typical strategy, using a stimulus set with balanced dimensions avoids noise and bias. Although several visual art datasets exist, none have been specifically designed to control many dimensions simultaneously. In response to the need of a well-controlled and balanced stimulus set, the Leuven Orthogonalized Art Dataset (LOAD) controls and balances dimensions related to aesthetic appreciation, including style, content, emotional valence, and liking/beauty. Each artwork in the image set was first carefully selected to fit a balanced design, then annotated by 50 participants on measures of pleasure, fluency, interest, liking, emotional valence, and familiarity for further validation. This careful annotation process also aims to disentangle the often- ambiguous interrelations among several aesthetic appraisals such as pleasure, interest, and liking. By providing balanced designs across multiple dimensions, LOAD serves as a valuable and highly flexible tool for exploring the complexities of aesthetic appreciation.

Recently, there is a renewed debate concerning the role of perspective in vision. Morales et al. (2020) present evidence that, in the case of viewing a rotated coin, the visual system is sensitive to what has often been called "perspectival shapes." It has generated vigorous discussions, including an online symposium by Morales and Cohen, an exchange between Linton (2021) and Morales et al. (2021), and most recently, a fierce critique by Burge and Burge (2022), in which they launch various conceptual and empirical objections. Although Morales and Firestone (2022) have responded to them recently, and we are in agreement with Morales and Firestone in general, there are further problems in Burge and Burge (2022) that are worth highlighting. The main point of this comment is that what the Burge-Burge team call "viewpoint-dependent relational properties" are simply instances of what the Morales-Firestone team call "perspectival shapes"; the confusion arises from Burge and Burge's misconstrual of Morales et al.'s claims. This shows that conceptually, the two teams are in large agreement, as Morales and Firestone (2022) also point out, and the focus should be put on the empirical disagreements, which has been covered by Morales and Firestone (2022). Relatedly, we argue that Burge and Burge (2022) misinterpret Morales et al. (2020) as supporting a new entity in perception science, and that this misinterpretation is a primary source of their apparent disagreement. This is worth pointing out because such misunderstanding generates many unnecessary quarrels that hinder progress. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).