Abstract
Animals are ancestrally important stimuli for humans who pay disproportional attention to animal objects and exhibit an outstanding ability to categorize animal species, especially those most relevant to them. We assessed human aesthetic preferences toward milk snakes, the traditional model for studies of Batesian mimicry.
We asked the respondents to rank 34 pictures of milk snakes according to perceived beauty. The sets covered most of naturally occurring variation in milk snake appearance.
While ranking the beauty, the respondents spontaneously classified the species according to two dimensions. The species clustered in a similar way irrespective of evaluated set.
In conclusion, humans showed a surprising ability to classify milk snake patterns; they repeatedly formed the same distinct groups of species, thus completing a process that resembles unsupervised categorization.