Forest for the Trees—Why We Recognize Faces & Constellations

For many thousands of years, and across cultures around the world, symmetry has been seen as beautiful. The mirror-image accuracy of the Parthenon is seen also in the Taj Mahal and the geometric patterns of traditional Navajo rugs. We see symmetry in more fluid, modern media, too, like the delicately mirrored shot composition of Wes Anderson and Stanley Kubrick films. We’re even more likely to perceive a face as beautiful (pdf) if it is more symmetric. 

All of these are examples of bilateral symmetry—one half looks nearly identical to the other half. In a more general sense, symmetries are properties that remain invariant under some transformation; images with bilateral symmetry stay the same after reflectionacross a central line, for example. A recent synthesis of ideas from psychology suggests that symmetry, in this bigger sense, is not only aesthetically appealing but also important for how we visually make sense of the world. 

These symmetries are rarely properties offrom the interactions between all elements in the scene. It is the whole figure that matters. You can’t explain the beauty of the Taj Mahal by pointing to the curvature of one of its domes or the height of one of its towers. This was the central insight of the Gestalt (German for “shape”) school of psychology, which swept through Germany in the early 20th century and is now undergoing something of a modern rebirth. The Gestalt story about how symmetry powers our perception starts with a phenomenon called perceptual grouping.