Spot the pattern
The study carried out by myself and Meixuan Chen, a research student, involved two stages. In the first stage, we tested ten pairs of patterns on 20 participants. This may not sound like a big group, but you have to appreciate that we tested each participant for a number of hours. The findings correlated across over 80% of them, a big majority, which in this kind of study is considered enough to draw conclusions about the population as a whole.
As you can see from the picture above, each participant was shown the images on a computer screen. We investigated their emotional responses by measuring their brain and heart activity respectively using EEG and ECG monitors, as well as asking them how they felt about each pattern.
We didn’t show the participants different categories of patterns at this stage, but rather a wide selection. We deliberately made them black and white, since using colours would have risked contaminating the results. Here are the patterns: