Investigations of human EEG response to viewing fractal patterns

Abstract

Owing to the prevalence of fractal patterns in natural scenery and their growing impact on cultures around the world, fractals constitute a common feature of our daily visual experiences, raising an important question: what responses do fractals induce in the observer? We monitored subjects’ EEG while they were viewing fractals with different fractal dimensions and the results show that significant effects could be found in the EEG even by employing relatively simple silhouette images. Patterns with a fractal dimension of 1.3 elicited the most interesting EEG, with the highest alpha in the frontal lobes but also the highest beta in the parietal area, pointing to a complicated interplay between different parts of the brain when experiencing this pattern

Published in

Perception
2008, volume: 37, number: 10, pages: 1488-1494
Publisher: Pion

SLU Authors

• Hägerhäll, Caroline

  • Department of Landscape Architecture, Planning and Management, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    
  • Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU)

UKÄ Subject classification

Landscape Architecture
Neurosciences
Psychology (excluding Applied Psychology)

Publication identifier

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1068/p5918

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/19229