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Perceptual biases, camouflage patterns, and the origin of sexual signals
- Yseult Héjja-Brichard
- Michel Raymond
- Innes Cuthill
- Tamra Mendelson
- Julien P. Renoult
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Description: In the visual domain, considerable evidence supports a "processing bias" by which people prefer images that match the spatial statistics of natural scenes, likely because the brain has evolved to process such scenes efficiently. A direct but untested prediction of this bias is that people should prefer background-matching camouflage. We conducted an online experiment where we show for the first time human preference for camouflaged patterning. Our results also confirm a seemingly universal preference for the most frequent scale invariance observed in natural scenes, but we demonstrate that this preference is not fixed and can be shifted toward the scale invariance of the background. Because many of the underlying visual mechanisms are shared across vertebrates, our results suggest that camouflage patterns in animals can serve as evolutionary precursors of sexual signals.