What is Interesting?
Exploring the relationship between complexity, expertise, and interest
What makes some things interesting?
Take this post, for example. Why would someone choose to continue reading?
Some reasons are hard-to-quantify features, like whether the article has hooked you. Maybe it's raised some question that you have an inherent interest in, maybe it seems amusing and not poorly written (😬).
But another important aspect is how complex it is. If it's too simple, if you can predict everything I'm going to say, it'll be boring. You won't be getting any information out of it.
If it's too complex, the same thing will happen. If this writing was dense with technical terms and equations, few people would stick around. It would be hard to interpret what I'm saying, and again most folks wouldn't get much out of it.
There's a sweet spot, a Goldilocks zone that's the "just-right" amount of complexity.
But this doesn't just go for written content. This relationship between interest and complexity is widespread.
Goldilocks and the Baby Looking Times
Babies have a hard job. As William James put it, the world starts as a "blooming, buzzing confusion", and they somehow need to seek the regularities and learn enough about the world to navigate it.
I've talked before about how babies are surprisingly good statistical learners. They need to be in order to learn language from the messy sounds that come out of our mouths.
But babies also need to decide what information to pay attention to. Babies aren't just passive sponges taking things in—they are active participants, deciding what to look at or interact with.
By measuring what infants spend their time looking at, we can get a sense of what they deem interesting. One study showed infants a sequence of events, some of those events repeating frequently (therefore being very predictable) and others happening infrequently (therefore being surprising). It turns out babies as young as 7-months allocate their attention to events that aren't too predictable or too surprising—they look for a happy medium of surprisingness.
They are most interested in a "just-right" amount of complexity (hence the name of the paper, "The Goldilocks Effect").
The study authors argue that this is a generalized learning strategy to help direct attention to where the most can be learned.
It turns out this generalizes at least a bit—infants do the same with sounds, and the same behavior has been observed in monkeys.
I knew all of this from grad school (full disclosure, I was involved in the monkey bit).
The general framework makes sense and seems to have a relationship with interests I've explored previously: curiosity and wonder. So recently, I went looking to see how much this generalizes to other domains, whether it is really a general trend in what we find interesting. This took me to a surprising place: aesthetics.
Aesthetics
I don't know much about the psychology of aesthetics or about visual art. I'm not exactly an artist. I fully expect my drawing abilities to be surpassed by my kids while they are in grade school, since at the age of 3 my eldest's tadpole people and scribbles already give my best drawing a run for its money. I think my wife
is currently the best artist in the family given that she can draw a pretty good cow—she agreed to draw one for this article (hence her co-authorship on this article, I have to recognize the contribution).
So it came as a surprise to me when I found these inverted-U relationships are commonly talked about in aesthetics. People tend to find more complex visual art more interesting, but only up to a point.
Where this point is depends on the individual. For example, individuals with a self-reported higher ability to understand abstract art also rated more complex polygons more interesting in an experiment. The study authors argue that what we find interesting is based on a trade-off between the complexity of a stimulus and an individual's ability to cope with that complexity, and this trade-off results in the inverted-U shape discussed above.
The interesting thing here is that they explicitly were testing this at an individual level—they assumed different people had different abilities to cope, and therefore expected (and found) different preferences for complexity.
I'm not particularly into abstract art. I feel like I don't get it. Apparently, I'm very much not alone—most people without visual art training have a strong preference for realism in art, and hence tend to strongly dislike abstract art.
But those with more expertise get more out of abstract art. They look at different things. More specifically:
"[I]n terms of processing distinctions, style related processing characterises art experts whilst for naive viewers, content-related processing dominates"
Novices like me are looking at what the pictures are of. We look for realism—I see the people and objects, and if I'm lucky I'm able to get some emotional feel out of the scene being depicted.
Experts look at the stylistic elements of a work of art. How the lines, colors, and textures focus attention and create an overall impact through its dynamics and balance (or something lol I dunno how art works, I'm relying on the experts here).
This may be obvious, but I think it deserves to be spelled out: training and expertise seems to give us a greater ability to cope with more complexity in a domain, and shifts what features we are looking at, giving us an appreciation of things we otherwise wouldn't be able to appreciate.
I'm probably never going to get there with abstract art (though who knows, life is long, maybe next decade I'll decide to get into art). But having more information about a painting can help novices like me appreciate them more.
If you've ever wandered around an art museum, you'll have experienced museums giving some amount of information about the artworks. Sometimes it's simply the names of both the artist and the piece. Sometimes there's more—information about the artist themselves, what their interests were, what they described the piece as being about, or information about the artist's style. For novices (and not experts), this kind of information can help us appreciate art more.
The additional information seems to increase our ability to cope with complexity, giving us a framework for understanding what we're looking at.
Interest and Curiosity
I ended up going down this rabbit-hole because I have an interest in interest. I'm curious about curiosity. I wonder about wonder. (Don't worry, I also cringe at my own cringe.)
Having some background knowledge in the area due to previous research, I have an ability to cope with some amount of complexity in the area, letting me stretch out from areas I'm more comfortable in (the psychology and neuroscience of decision-making) to areas I have less familiarity with (the psychology of aesthetics).
One thing that's been hinted at here, but hasn't been explored as directly as I would like, is how expertise not only makes us able to cope with more complexity but gives us frameworks for thinking about our experience that shape how we see and understand the world. Hopefully my next rabbit-hole delve will result in more on that.
But an important lesson from all of this (other than that I'm art illiterate) is that we have some control over what we're interested in. Lots of topics are inherently complex. But in many areas, we have an opportunity to increase our ability to cope with complexity, and this can turn boring things interesting. Whether geopolitics or organic chemistry, if we can find an entry-point, we can gradually ramp up our ability to cope with greater levels of complexity without losing interest.
In a complex world, I think this is important. Our ability to be interested and curious increases our ability to engage with and really try to understand the intricacies of the world, and, perhaps, navigate it more successfully.
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I had the opportunity to see Mark Rothko's "No 2 (Red Maroons)" at the Cleveland Museum of Art. It fascinated me nearly as much as Edward Hopper's NIGHT HAWKS. That being said, probably Gary Larson is my favorite artist and Carrie's "COW" is magnificent.
Came here for the cow, stayed for the writing. Brilliant (both the cow and the writing).