Publication
Traces of Intentionality: Balance, Complexity, and Organisation in Artworks by Humans and Apes
Have you ever stood in front of an abstract artwork and thought: “a monkey could have done that!”. As it turns out, you are wrong.
- Author
- Larissa M. Straffon, Juan O. Perea-García, Tijmen den Blaauwen, Mariska E. Kret
- Date
- 08 September 2025
- Links
- Read the full publication through Wiley Online Library
Several experiments have shown that people can correctly distinguish between abstract paintings made by prolific expressionist artists like Karel Appel and Mark Rothko, and ‘similar’ paintings made by children and animals. According to those studies, it all comes down to the fact that people are good at ‘reading’ intentionality, so that observers reported the artists’ paintings as overall more structured than their child and animal counterparts. That made us wonder whether such structural distinctiveness was specific to the works of these famous painters, or if this was a more general human ‘signature’ present in all art, even when made by an average person.
To test this, we took ten abstract paintings made by regular students, and ten abstract artworks made by chimpanzees and presented them to participants in a two-alternative forced choice experimental design, where they had to decide if the painting they were looking at was made by a human or a great ape. There were two conditions, in one we showed the stimuli ‘as is’, and in the other we artificially manipulated the images to equalize them in terms of colour and texture. In line with the previous studies, our participants were able to correctly guess authorship above chance level in both conditions.
In a second study, we wanted to investigate whether there was some sort of strategy that people were using to infer intentionality in visual compositions. A literature review suggested that readings of intentionality might be influenced by three perceptual features. The first is ‘balance’ or the distribution of elements along the axes of a composition. The second is ‘complexity’, or the quantity and variety of elements in a composition. The third is ‘organization’, or the location of elements in the area of visual interest of the composition. We therefore asked another group of participants to rate the same twenty artworks on intentionality, balance, complexity, and organization. In addition, we asked them to assess them according to preference.
Human paintings were rated higher on all accounts, except for complexity. Yet, when we looked at the combined contribution of balance, complexity, and organization to intentionality and preference, we found a strong connection across conditions. This suggests to us that there are certain perceptual formal features of visual compositions whose combination might underlie readings of human intentionality, and that these are pervasive to all human art, be it made by talented artists or regular people.
Our results touch upon a deep and multidimensional relationship between visual perceptual features and intentionality. We are the only primate species able to create regular visual patterns, therefore our visual system is highly tuned to register even subtle variations in balance and organisation. And we use such features to infer and attribute human intentionality to all sorts of configurations, even when it is not there, as when a natural geometric arrangement of rocks is thought to have been made by some mysterious agents, or a symmetrical alignment of marks is thought to be an unknown writing system. Recognizing when a pattern actually was made by other humans, however, may have been an important advantage throughout evolution, which is likely why we possess such an ability, even when we are not aware of it. Also, the correlation we found between intentionality and preference may suggest that we are ‘wired’ to pay attention to patterns made by our conspecifics.
In sum, our research is the first to explicitly demonstrate that features related to the arrangement of elements in a visual composition such as distribution (balance), quantity (complexity), and structure (organization) interact to signal intentionality to observers, guiding the correct identification of an artwork as human-made, not only when it has been created by a talented artist.
Photo by Justyn Warner on Unsplash