Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Humans favor pictorial representations of agents with more space in front of them than behind them. This preference hasbeen evidenced in forced choice (Palmer, Gardner, & Wickens, 2008) and drag and drop tasks (Palmer & Langlois, 2017),and has been referred to as a forward bias in aesthetic preferences for spatial composition. It has also been documentedin depictions of animals and referred to as an anterior bias (Bode et al., 2011). We extend the study of this bias bylooking at the evolution of portrait painting in Europe (where classical rules demanded centering). For this we analyzeprofile-oriented portraits from two datasets: one Pan-European subset of the one used in Redies et al. (2007), and a secondone compiled from the London National Portrait Gallerys online collections. We confirm the bias and discuss links withunderlying mechanisms of animacy and agency perception.