The effect of parametric physical attributes of 2d shapes on shape recall and on classifiying shapes as natural or unnatural

Previous research in the visual perception domain has shown the interaction between some attributes of shapes and how humans perceive them differently when those attributes are changing. However we felt there are not enough resources in the literature regarding the geometrical parameters of 2D shapes. Also about the naturalness classification in visual perception, there are studies focusing on the natural scenes but again, the knowledge of the naturalness perception according to the 2D geometrical shape parameters is pretty limited. In this study we aimed at combining these two subdomains and providing quantitative findings about how the geometrical parameters like edge count, concavity, naturalness and uniformity are affecting the memory performance and naturalness classification for a shape. We designed a behavioural experiment to test different shapes with different values of those parameters and presented these shapes to participants in a recall task and a naturalness survey. Then we ran some correlation analysis between those values and memory performance and naturalness rating. We found out that edge count and concavity significantly affects the memory performance for a shape. Another finding was that our judgement of a shape being natural or artificial is affected by the edge count, concavity level and roundness level of a shape. Lastly, we observed that the memory performance is worse for the shapes that are rated as natural.