Our art project is based on the following visual studies and our natural shapes undergo a mathematical process called fractal analysis to ensure they possess the beneficial properties that the research on fractal dimension provides.
(see menu tab 'What is Fractal Art')
Research and article links:
For more information on fractals see the following menu heading with dropdown links: The Fractal Art Difference
Fractals are patterns that self-repeat at different scales, and they can be found all over nature in objects like trees, rivers, clouds and coastlines. Because of this prevalence of natural fractals, the human brain has evolved to respond favorably to fractals, and to do so in the blink of an eye. The human brain only needs 50 milliseconds to detect the presence of fractals.
“As soon as we look at nature, it triggers a cascade of automatic responses,” Taylor explained. “Even before we’ve noticed what we’re looking at, we’re responding to it.” And the response is a positive one. Humans experience less stress and better well-being when looking at nature, and this is driven by fractals. Taylor’s research has found that fractals can reduce stress and mental fatigue for the observer by as much as 60 percent.
So Taylor is collaborating with UO psychologist Margaret Sereno and architect Ihab Elzeyadi on scientifically informed design projects that incorporate the kind of fractals that are pleasing to the human brain when viewed in the spaces people work and live in. Some examples are the fractal carpets that Taylor’s team designed for the Knight Campus and spaces like workplaces, schools, airports and other places where people experience heightened anxiety.
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Professor Anna Franklin, Sussex Baby Lab at the University of Sussex, explains what babies can see and what they like to look at.https://www.askdrsears.com/topics/parenting/child-rearing-and-development/bright-starts-babys-development-through-interactive-play/playtime-articles/visual-stimulation-newborns/
At birth, a baby’s retina is not fully developed. The retina is the back layer of the eye that detects light. An adult retina can distinguish many different shades of light and color, but a newborn retina can only detect large contrasts between light and dark, or black and white. Research has proven that black and white contrasts register powerfully on baby’s retina and send the strongest visual signals to baby’s brain. Stronger signals mean more brain growth and faster visual development. So what about those nice soft pastels that used to be so popular in baby toys and nurseries? While these may look pretty to you, they do nothing visually for your baby. Surround a baby with soft pastel colors, and you might as well be blindfolding him.
https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/3265925
The Effect of the Use of Black and White Flashcards on Acute Pain Levels in Infants* Conclusion: We concluded that the use of black and white flashcards during the vaccination practices was efficient. In line with these results, we recommend that nurses use black and white flashcards, an easily applicable method, to decrease the pain sensitivity of infants during vaccine applications.
https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/infant_vision_development_helping_babies_see_their_bright_futures
Birth to Four Months. During the first year of life, your baby is experiencing rapid growth, physically, cognitively and emotionally. Being that vision is the least developed sense at birth, a lot happens during the first 12 months. Babies have an easier time focusing on high contrast objects during this stage of development. Black and white photos with contrasting patterns or images, also called infant stimulation cards, are easy for your infant to focus on and can encourage their vision development. Five to Eight Months Infants are beginning to develop depth perception, a more sensitive perception of color vision and can accomplish tasks like moving an object from one hand to the other.
Your baby will start to be able to tell the difference between strange and familiar faces. Research has shown that the secret to infant visual stimulation lies in high-contrast colors. The development of a newborn's eyes - the structures of the retina that perceive color - haven't matured enough to perceive the values and intensities of red, blue, pink, yellow, purple and green. Black and white are the easiest for babies to perceive and interest in these starkly contrasting colors will pave the way for your baby's brain development.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0022096578900413
Louise Hainlin
The eye movements of infants, aged 4–5, 7–8, and 10–11 weeks, were recorded while they viewed either a representation of a face or a nonface stimulus. Presentation of the visual stimulus was paired with the presentation of an auditory stimulus (either voice or tone) or silence. Attention to the visual stimulus was greater for the older two groups than for the youngest group. The effect of the addition of sound was to increase attention to the visual stimulus. In general, the face was looked at more than the nonface stimulus. The difference in visual attention between the face and the nonface stimulus did not appear to be based solely on the physical characteristics of the stimuli. A sharp increase in the amount of looking at the eyes of the face stimulus at 7–8 weeks of age seemed to be related to a developing appreciation of the meaning of the face as a pattern.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0022096572900033
The visual response of 16 newborn infants to a black-white edge and to a blank homogeneous field was recorded by corneal-reflection photography. Each infant was presented the edge once in a vertical orientation, to the left or right of center, and once in a horizontal orientation, above or below center. Vertical edges clearly attracted the newborn's gaze but horizontal edges appeared to have no effect whatsoever.
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2008/sep/26/family
Rapt in Black and White
For the past 20 years, experiments by neuroscientists have shown that babies do indeed home in on this type of image. The preference lasts from birth until about seven months. "While babies can see from birth, their visual acuity is poor and they have problems changing their focus to near or far objects," explains Professor Mark Johnson of Birkbeck College's Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development in London, who has studied infant brains for two decades. "This means that if something is not at an optimal distance for them - about 50cm - it will appear fuzzy and de-focused for the first few months. The limitations in babies' vision makes simple bold patterns with high-contrast boundaries more visible." By the time they are one year old, vision in babies is approximately similar to that of adults, he adds.
Neuroscientists know babies seek out these images from simple preference experiments. They show babies pictures and note which ones their eyes are drawn to. Professor Usha Goswami, director of the Centre for Neuroscience in Education at Cambridge University, explains: "Anything with very obvious contrast - such as black and white edges and lines - is an optimal stimulant for the visual system," she says. "This type of stimulation basically gets the system up and running - but all images do this to a degree, not just black and white ones." We do not know yet whether babies see the same (whole) picture that adults see or whether they just focus on these lines and edges. Babies would be most likely to respond to any image that resembles a face, says Goswami,"especially when the image is an actual human or a symmetric depiction."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_perception
Early development. Despite numerous studies, there is no widely accepted time-frame in which the average human develops the ability to perceive faces.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/infant-perception
Infant perception, process by which a human infant (age 0 to 12 months) gains awareness of and responds to external stimuli.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_visual_development
Newborns are exceptionally capable of facial discrimination and recognition shortly after birth.[12][13] Therefore, it is not surprising that infants develop strong facial recognition of their mother. Studies have shown that newborns have a preference for their mothers' faces two weeks after birth. At this stage, infants would focus their visual attention on pictures of their own mother for a longer period than a picture of complete strangers.[14] Studies have shown that infants even as early as four days old look longer at their mothers' face than at those of strangers only when the mother is not wearing a head scarf. This may suggest that hairline and outer perimeter of the face play an integral part in the newborn's face recognition.[15] According to Maurer and Salapateck, a one-month-old baby scans the outer contour of the face, with strong focus on the eyes, while a two-month-old scans more broadly and focuses on the features of the face, including the eyes and mouth.[10]
https://www.allaboutvision.com/en-au/children-vision/problems-infants/
At birth, your baby sees only in black and white and shades of grey. This is because nerve cells in the retina and brain that control colour vision are not fully developed.
https://www.tinylove.com/us_en/articles/newborn-development
Interested in some expert input on how to support your young baby's sight? Developmental Psychologist Dr. Dana Erhard-Weiss.
The structure of the eye, with the round contour, iris and black pupil, is an area of high contrast that also draws babies’ attention.
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/heavily-decorated-classrooms-disrupt-attention-and-learning-in-young-children.html
Psychology researchers Anna V. Fisher, Karrie E. Godwin and Howard Seltman of Carnegie Mellon University looked at whether classroom displays affected children’s ability to maintain focus during instruction and to learn the lesson content. They found that children in highly decorated classrooms were more distracted, spent more time off-task and demonstrated smaller learning gains than when the decorations were removed
https://www.thoughtco.com/decorating-your-classroom-4077035
‘A cluttered classroom environment could be distracting students from learning. Too much visual stimulation in the classroom can be distracting. For many students, the text and graphic-rich classroom environments begin in their early education (Pre-K and elementary) classrooms. These classrooms may be decorated to an extreme’. ‘Too often, clutter passes for quality, a sentiment expressed by Erika Christakis in her book The Importance of Being Little: What Preschoolers Really Need from Grownups (2016). In Chapter 2 ("Goldilocks Goes to Daycare") Christakis describes the average preschool the following way’: "First we'll bombard you with what educators call a print-rich environment, every wall and surface festooned with a vertiginous array of labels, vocabulary list, calendars, graphs, classroom rules, alphabet lists, number charts, and inspirational platitudes - few of those symbols you will be able to decode, a favorite buzzword for what used to be known as reading"(33).
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10648-022-09658-5
This paper provides a PRISMA-guided systematic review of the literature examining the effects of nature interventions on the cognitive functioning of young people aged 5 to 18 years. The pressure of modern-day westernized living involving technology, high-rise buildings, traffic congestion and pollution is taking a toll on society. These lifestyle changes have led to reduced opportunities for interacting with nature (Hartig et al., 2014) and a fast-paced lifestyle that can be psychologically draining. Subsequently health and well-being are compromised as evidenced by escalating rates of mental illness (Blake et al., 2018; Michaelson et al., 2020; Vancampfort et al., 2018). In an attempt to reduce fatigue and improve well-being, research attention has turned to the potential healing effects of nature (Capaldi et al, 2015; Diaz et al., 2015; Hartig et al., 2014)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6926748/
Contact with nature has been proposed as a solution to achieve physiological relaxation and stress recovery, and a number of scientific verification outcomes have been shown. Compared with studies of the other senses, studies investigating the visual effects of nature have been at the forefront of this research field. A variety of physiological indicators adopted for use in indoor experiments have shown the benefits of viewing nature. In this systematic review, we examined current peer-reviewed articles regarding the physiological effects of visual stimulation from elements or representations of nature in an indoor setting
https://theconversation.com/cant-go-outside-even-seeing-nature-on-a-screen-can-improve-your-mood-135320
Our research also explored whether viewing images, posters or paintings of nature would make a difference. We photographed the plants from viewpoints similar to those the corridor users experienced. Survey responses from those who only viewed these digital images were almost the same as those who experienced them in real life. While we can’t say for sure, we can hypothesise that given the importance of vision in modern humans, an image that “looks” like nature might be enough to trigger a biophilic response.
Other reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/Optic_nerve