Berlyne Revisited: Evidence for the Multifaceted Nature of Hedonic Tone in the Appreciation of Paintings and Music

Using machine learning to predict judgments on Western visual art along content-representational and formal-perceptual attributes

Art research has long aimed to unravel the complex associations between specific attributes, such as color, complexity, and emotional expressiveness, and art judgments, including beauty, creativity, and liking. However, the fundamental distinction between attributes as inherent characteristics or features of the artwork and judgments as subjective evaluations remains an exciting topic. This paper reviews the literature of the last half century, to identify key attributes, and employs machine learning, specifically Gradient Boosted Decision Trees (GBDT), to predict 13 art judgments along 17 attributes. Ratings from 78 art novice participants were collected for 54 Western artworks. Our GBDT models successfully predicted 13 judgments significantly. Notably, judged creativity and disturbing/irritating judgments showed the highest predictability, with the models explaining 31% and 32% of the variance, respectively. The attributes emotional expressiveness, valence, symbolism, as well as complexity emerged as consistent and significant contributors to the models' performance. Content-representational attributes played a more prominent role than formal-perceptual attributes. Moreover, we found in some cases non-linear relationships between attributes and judgments with sudden inclines or declines around medium levels of the rating scales. By uncovering these underlying patterns and dynamics in art judgment behavior, our research provides valuable insights to advance the understanding of aesthetic experiences considering visual art, inform cultural practices, and inspire future research in the field of art appreciation.

Selective interference of liking and beauty judgements on affective working memory and visual working memory

Aesthetic processing has profound implications for everyday life. Although liking and beauty judgements are outcomes of aesthetic processing and derive from a common hedonic value, there may be some differences in how they engage working memory. This study used maintenance and aesthetic judgement tasks to examine whether liking and beauty judgements make different demands on domain-specific working memory resources. Sixty participants (30 males) were instructed to rate picture for liking or beauty while maintaining the subjective affect or brightness of the presented pictures. Results indicated that liking judgements selectively impaired participants' performance in the affect maintenance task, and beauty judgements selectively impaired their performance in the brightness maintenance task. In addition, maintaining affect and brightness feelings in the mind increased image ratings on beauty but not on liking. Our findings provide evidence that liking judgements draw more on affective working memory resources than beauty judgements, and beauty judgements draw more on visual working memory resources than liking judgements.

Cross-cultural comparison of beauty judgments in visual art using machine learning analysis of art attribute predictors among Japanese and German speakers

In empirical art research, understanding how viewers judge visual artworks as beautiful is often explored through the study of attributes-specific inherent characteristics or artwork features such as color, complexity, and emotional expressiveness. These attributes form the basis for subjective evaluations, including the judgment of beauty. Building on this conceptual framework, our study examines the beauty judgments of 54 Western artworks made by native Japanese and German speakers, utilizing an extreme randomized trees model-a data-driven machine learning approach-to investigate cross-cultural differences in evaluation behavior. Our analysis of 17 attributes revealed that visual harmony, color variety, valence, and complexity significantly influenced beauty judgments across both cultural cohorts. Notably, preferences for complexity diverged significantly: while the native Japanese speakers found simpler artworks as more beautiful, the native German speakers evaluated more complex artworks as more beautiful. Further cultural distinctions were observed: for the native German speakers, emotional expressiveness was a significant factor, whereas for the native Japanese speakers, attributes such as brushwork, color world, and saturation were more impactful. Our findings illuminate the nuanced role that cultural context plays in shaping aesthetic judgments and demonstrate the utility of machine learning in unravelling these complex dynamics. This research not only advances our understanding of how beauty is judged in visual art-considering self-evaluated attributes-across different cultures but also underscores the potential of machine learning to enhance our comprehension of the aesthetic evaluation of visual artworks.

Aesthetic valence: Psychophysical perspectives

Comparisons of aesthetic valence and of sensory magnitude are subject to similar order effects, indicating an evolved mechanism that sharpens also aesthetic discrimination. As the foundation of pleasantness and aesthetic valence of an object, an optimal level of evoked arousal or, in more recent research, of information load, has been proposed. According to discrepancy theory, this evoked effect is modulated by the object's deviation from the current adaptation level (AL). The AL is built up and updated by pooling recent stimulation. A model based on these concepts is proposed here, and it is illustrated by results of empirical studies by the author's students. For everyday objects such as cars and ladies' clothes, rated beauty was related by a U-shaped function to rated modernity. Minimal beauty occurred for intermediate modernity. For ladies' clothes, this minimum was situated higher on the modernity scale for females and extraverts. As modernity can be seen as the amount of deviation from the AL which represents the usual, this shift could be explained by faster upward adjustment of the AL. In contrast, for paintings the relation between modernity and beauty was inversely U-shaped. This could be due to paintings intrinsically carrying more information than other objects, as indicated by ratings of hard-to-access, with which rated beauty had an inverse U-shaped relation. In a factor-analytic study of preference for 42 paintings four orthogonal factors were extracted, interpreted as High and Low modernity, and High and Low information content. This could yield a rudimentary empirical typology of art.

Stimulus Complexity Can Enhance Art Appreciation: Phenomenological and Psychophysiological Evidence for the Pleasure-Interest Model of Aesthetic Liking

We tested predictions deriving from the "Pleasure-Interest Model of Aesthetic Liking" (PIA Model), whereby aesthetic preferences arise from two fluency-based processes: an initial automatic, percept-driven default process and a subsequent perceiver-driven reflective process. One key trigger for reflective processing is stimulus complexity. Moreover, if meaning can be derived from such complexity, then this can engender increased interest and elevated liking. Experiment 1 involved graffiti street-art images, pre-normed to elicit low, moderate and high levels of interest. Subjective reports indicated a predicted enhancement in liking across increasing interest levels. Electroencephalography (EEG) recordings during image viewing revealed different patterns of alpha power in temporal brain regions across interest levels. Experiment 2 enforced a brief initial image-viewing stage and a subsequent reflective image-viewing stage. Differences in alpha power arose in most EEG channels between the initial and deliberative viewing stages. A linear increase in aesthetic liking was again seen across interest levels, with different patterns of alpha activity in temporal and occipital regions across these levels. Overall, the phenomenological data support the PIA Model, while the physiological data suggest that enhanced aesthetic liking might be associated with "flow-feelings" indexed by alpha activity in brain regions linked to visual attention and reducing distraction.

The dual effect of background music on creativity: perspectives of music preference and cognitive interference

Music, an influential environmental factor, significantly shapes cognitive processing and everyday experiences, thus rendering its effects on creativity a dynamic topic within the field of cognitive science. However, debates continue about whether music bolsters, obstructs, or exerts a dual influence on individual creativity. Among the points of contention is the impact of contrasting musical emotions-both positive and negative-on creative tasks. In this study, we focused on traditional Chinese music, drawn from a culture known for its 'preference for sadness,' as our selected emotional stimulus and background music. This choice, underrepresented in previous research, was based on its uniqueness. We examined the effects of differing music genres (including vocal and instrumental), each characterized by a distinct emotional valence (positive or negative), on performance in the Alternative Uses Task (AUT). To conduct this study, we utilized an affective arousal paradigm, with a quiet background serving as a neutral control setting. A total of 114 participants were randomly assigned to three distinct groups after completing a music preference questionnaire: instrumental, vocal, and silent. Our findings showed that when compared to a quiet environment, both instrumental and vocal music as background stimuli significantly affected AUT performance. Notably, music with a negative emotional charge bolstered individual originality in creative performance. These results lend support to the dual role of background music in creativity, with instrumental music appearing to enhance creativity through factors such as emotional arousal, cognitive interference, music preference, and psychological restoration. This study challenges conventional understanding that only positive background music boosts creativity and provides empirical validation for the two-path model (positive and negative) of emotional influence on creativity.

The complexity-aesthetics relationship for musical rhythm is more fixed than flexible: Evidence from children and expert dancers

The urge to move to music (groove) depends in part on rhythmic syncopation in the music. For adults, the syncopation-groove relationship has an inverted-U shape: listeners want to move most to rhythms that have some, but not too much, syncopation. However, we do not know whether the syncopation-groove relationship is relatively sensitive to, or resistant to, a listener's experience. In two sets of experiments, we tested whether the syncopation-groove relationship is affected by dance experience or changes through development in childhood. Dancers and nondancers rated groove for 50 rhythmic patterns varying in syncopation. Dancers' and nondancers' ratings did not differ (and Bayesian tests provided substantial evidence that they were equivalent) in terms of mean groove and the optimal level of syncopation. Similarly, ballet and hip-hop dancers' syncopation-groove relationships did not differ. However, dancers had more robust syncopation-groove relationships (higher goodness-of-fit) than nondancers. Children (3-6 years old) completed two tasks to assess their syncopation-groove relationships: In a 2-alternative-forced choice task, children compared rhythms from 2 of 3 possible levels of syncopation (low, medium, and high) and chose which rhythm in a pair was better for dancing. In a dance task, children danced to the same rhythms. Results from both tasks indicated that for children, as for adults, medium syncopation rhythms elicit more groove than low syncopation rhythms. A follow-up experiment replicated the 2-alternative-forced choice task results. Taken together, the results suggest the optimal level of syncopation for groove is resistant to experience, although experience may affect the robustness of the inverted-U relationship. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: In Experiment 1, dancers and nondancers rated groove (the urge to move) for musical rhythms, demonstrating the same inverted-U relationships between syncopation and groove. In Experiment 2, children and adults both chose rhythms with moderate syncopation more than low syncopation as more groove-inducing or better for dancing. Children also danced more for moderate than low syncopation, showing a close perception-behavior relationship across tasks. Similarities in the syncopation-groove relationship regardless of dance training and age suggest that this perceptual and behavioral groove response to rhythmic complexity may be quite resistant to experience.

Machine learning revealed symbolism, emotionality, and imaginativeness as primary predictors of creativity evaluations of western art paintings

Creativity is a compelling yet elusive phenomenon, especially when manifested in visual art, where its evaluation is often a subjective and complex process. Understanding how individuals judge creativity in visual art is a particularly intriguing question. Conventional linear approaches often fail to capture the intricate nature of human behavior underlying such judgments. Therefore, in this study, we employed interpretable machine learning to probe complex associations between 17 subjective art-attributes and creativity judgments across a diverse range of artworks. A cohort of 78 non-art expert participants assessed 54 artworks varying in styles and motifs. The applied Random Forests regressor models accounted for 30% of the variability in creativity judgments given our set of art-attributes. Our analyses revealed symbolism, emotionality, and imaginativeness as the primary attributes influencing creativity judgments. Abstractness, valence, and complexity also had an impact, albeit to a lesser degree. Notably, we observed non-linearity in the relationship between art-attribute scores and creativity judgments, indicating that changes in art-attributes did not consistently correspond to changes in creativity judgments. Employing statistical learning, this investigation presents the first attribute-integrating quantitative model of factors that contribute to creativity judgments in visual art among novice raters. Our research represents a significant stride forward building the groundwork for first causal models for future investigations in art and creativity research and offering implications for diverse practical applications. Beyond enhancing comprehension of the intricate interplay and specificity of attributes used in evaluating creativity, this work introduces machine learning as an innovative approach in the field of subjective judgment.

The consumers' response to product design: a narrative review

This paper reviews the research ideas around consumer response to product design. From the product side, we discuss the most significant design features preferred by average consumers, such as aesthetics and utility. And from the consumer side, we investigate the human factors influencing consumer perceptions. We present the main approaches used to measure the consumer response to product design and summarize the multiple biases that occur during the evaluation. Finally, we present in detail the most commonly used methods to analyze consumer response data and their roles in the design evaluation context. Practitioner Summary: To answer the question: What causes differences in design response? We summarise the research findings related to product design features and human factors. We highlight the biases that can emerge from the measurement approach. And discuss the most common analysis methods used for product design response information.

Do some languages sound more beautiful than others?

Italian is sexy, German is rough-but how about Páez or Tamil? Are there universal phonesthetic judgments based purely on the sound of a language, or are preferences attributable to language-external factors such as familiarity and cultural stereotypes? We collected 2,125 recordings of 228 languages from 43 language families, including 5 to 11 speakers of each language to control for personal vocal attractiveness, and asked 820 native speakers of English, Chinese, or Semitic languages to indicate how much they liked these languages. We found a strong preference for languages perceived as familiar, even when they were misidentified, a variety of cultural-geographical biases, and a preference for breathy female voices. The scores by English, Chinese, and Semitic speakers were weakly correlated, indicating some cross-cultural concordance in phonesthetic judgments, but overall there was little consensus between raters about which languages sounded more beautiful, and average scores per language remained within ±2% after accounting for confounds related to familiarity and voice quality of individual speakers. None of the tested phonetic features-the presence of specific phonemic classes, the overall size of phonetic repertoire, its typicality and similarity to the listener's first language-were robust predictors of pleasantness ratings, apart from a possible slight preference for nontonal languages. While population-level phonesthetic preferences may exist, their contribution to perceptual judgments of short speech recordings appears to be minor compared to purely personal preferences, the speaker's voice quality, and perceived resemblance to other languages culturally branded as beautiful or ugly.

The binding of negative emotional stimuli with spatial information in working memory: A possible role for the episodic buffer

Introduction

Remembering where negative events occur has undeniable adaptive value, however, how these memories are formed remains elusive. We investigated the role of working memory subcomponents in binding emotional and visuo-spatial information using an emotional version of the object relocation task (EORT).

Methods

After displaying black rectangles simultaneously, emotional pictures (from the International Affective Pictures System) appeared sequentially over each rectangle. Participants repositioned the rectangles as accurately as possible after all stimuli had disappeared. During the EORT encoding phase, a verbal trail task was administered concurrently to selectively interfere with the central executive (CE). The immediate post-encoding administration of an object feature-report task was used to interfere with the episodic buffer (EB).

Results

Only the EB-interfering task prevented the emotion-enhancing effect of negative pictures. The latter effect was not observed with a concurrent executive task.

Discussion

Overall, our findings suggest that pre-attentive automatic processes are primarily involved in binding emotional and visuo-spatial information in the EB.

The intrinsic variance of beauty judgment

Recall memory and sequential dependence threaten the independence of successive beauty ratings. Such independence is usually assumed when using repeated measures to estimate the intrinsic variance of a rating. We call "intrinsic" the variance of all possible responses that the participant could give on a trial. Variance arises within and across participants. In attributing the measured variance to sources, the first step is to assess how much is intrinsic. In seven experiments, we measure how much of the variability across beauty ratings can be attributed to recall memory and sequential dependence. With a set size of one, memory is a problem and contributes half the measured variance. However, we showed that for both beauty and ellipticity, with set size of nine or more, recall memory causes a mere 10% increase in the variance of repeated ratings. Moreover, we showed that as long as the stimuli are diverse (i.e., represent different object categories), sequential dependence does not affect the variance of beauty ratings. Lastly, the variance of beauty ratings increases in proportion to the 0.15 power of stimulus set size. We show that the beauty rating of a stimulus in a diverse set is affected by the stimulus set size and not the value of other stimuli. Overall, we conclude that the variance of repeated ratings is a good way to estimate the intrinsic variance of a beauty rating of a stimulus in a diverse set.

Threatened by AI: Analyzing Users’ Responses to the Introduction of AI in a Crowd-Sourcing Platform

As artificial intelligence (AI) solutions are being rapidly deployed, they increasingly compete with human labor. This study examines designers’ strategies in response to the threat from the introduction of an AI system for simple logo designs in a crowdsourcing design platform. We find that, although designers with lower abilities are more likely to exit the platform, designers with higher abilities move away from the locus of threat in the lower-tier contests and switch to more-complex design contests after the introduction of the AI system. More interestingly, we find that, although unsuccessful designers respond to the threat from AI by increasing their participation across multiple contests, successful designers become more focused (i.e., they substantially increase the number of submissions within a contest) and more quality oriented (i.e., they increase emotional content and complexity of their designs) after the AI launch. Our findings show how designers can learn from the behaviors of the more successful designers to differentiate themselves from AI systems by leveraging the more-abstract design attributes. Platform operators would benefit from adopting better segmentations strategies: with AI solutions for simple design tasks, hybrid AI + human solutions for less-complex design tasks, and skilled human designers competing primarily for the more-complex design tasks.

Do we enjoy what we sense and perceive? A dissociation between aesthetic appreciation and basic perception of environmental objects or events

This integrative review rearticulates the notion of human aesthetics by critically appraising the conventional definitions, offerring a new, more comprehensive definition, and identifying the fundamental components associated with it. It intends to advance holistic understanding of the notion by differentiating aesthetic perception from basic perceptual recognition, and by characterizing these concepts from the perspective of information processing in both visual and nonvisual modalities. To this end, we analyze the dissociative nature of information processing in the brain, introducing a novel local-global integrative model that differentiates aesthetic processing from basic perceptual processing. This model builds on the current state of the art in visual aesthetics as well as newer propositions about nonvisual aesthetics. This model comprises two analytic channels: aesthetics-only channel and perception-to-aesthetics channel. The aesthetics-only channel primarily involves restricted local processing for quality or richness (e.g., attractiveness, beauty/prettiness, elegance, sublimeness, catchiness, hedonic value) analysis, whereas the perception-to-aesthetics channel involves global/extended local processing for basic feature analysis, followed by restricted local processing for quality or richness analysis. We contend that aesthetic processing operates independently of basic perceptual processing, but not independently of cognitive processing. We further conjecture that there might be a common faculty, labeled as aesthetic cognition faculty, in the human brain for all sensory aesthetics albeit other parts of the brain can also be activated because of basic sensory processing prior to aesthetic processing, particularly during the operation of the second channel. This generalized model can account not only for simple and pure aesthetic experiences but for partial and complex aesthetic experiences as well.

Sustainable Recognition Methods of Modeling Design Features of Light and Micro Vehicle-Mounted UAV: Based on Support Vector Regression and Kano Model

In the era of Industry 4.0, intelligent algorithms provide an effective way to make design methods more sustainable through mining people’s demands continuously, especially in the field of evaluating and predicting the user preferences of phasic or interim design schemes. Vehicle-mounted unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are of significance in mobility experience and traffic surveys. However, as a new type of product, UAVs lack general rules in modeling design and the process of development decision making presents some fuzzy characteristics, which make the evolution and iteration of modeling design more complex. Based on the theories of Kansei Engineering, this study utilized support vector regression (SVR) to establish a correlation model between design factors and preference degree. Because the perceptual evaluation knowledge is fuzzy and uncertain, the paper applied cross-validation and grid search methods to find the optimal parameters. The parameters of the SVR model were adjusted to meet the need for stable learning and for endurance of the noise from subjective experience data to improve the prediction effect and generalization ability. In addition, by means of the Kano model, the customers’ cognition of demand types was quantified to obtain the prioritization of UAV modeling design elements, as well as to compare with the preference scores to validate the feasibility of this research. It was found that the SVR model proposed in the study could effectively predict user preference (R2 = 0.763, RMSE = 0.057). For the UAVs with a higher preference score, the modeling characteristics were consistent with the attractive, one-dimensional or must-be quality elements in the results of the Kano model, which verified the reliability of the study. The conclusion is expected to provide a sustainable design method for vehicle-mounted UAVs commonly used in citizen travel and outdoor activities.

Atonal Music as a Model for Investigating Exploratory Behavior

Atonal music is often characterized by low predictability stemming from the absence of tonal or metrical hierarchies. In contrast, Western tonal music exhibits intrinsic predictability due to its hierarchical structure and therefore, offers a directly accessible predictive model to the listener. In consequence, a specific challenge of atonal music is that listeners must generate a variety of new predictive models. Listeners must not only refrain from applying available tonal models to the heard music, but they must also search for statistical regularities and build new rules that may be related to musical properties other than pitch, such as timbre or dynamics. In this article, we propose that the generation of such new predictive models and the aesthetic experience of atonal music are characterized by internal states related to exploration. This is a behavior well characterized in behavioral neuroscience as fulfilling an innate drive to reduce uncertainty but which has received little attention in empirical music research. We support our proposal with emerging evidence that the hedonic value is associated with the recognition of patterns in low-predictability sound sequences and that atonal music elicits distinct behavioral responses in listeners. We end by outlining new research avenues that might both deepen our understanding of the aesthetic experience of atonal music in particular, and reveal core qualities of the aesthetic experience in general.

Gaze patterns reveal aesthetic distance while viewing art

For centuries, Western philosophers have argued that aesthetic experiences differ from common, everyday pleasing sensations, and further, that mental states, such as disinterested contemplation and aesthetic distance, underlie these complex experiences. We empirically tested whether basic perceptual processes of information intake reveal evidence for aesthetic distance, specifically toward visual art. We conducted two eye tracking experiments using appropriately matched visual stimuli (environmental scenes and representational paintings) with 59 participants using two different presentation durations (25 and 6 s). Linear mixed-effects models considering individual differences showed that affective content (pleasantness and arousal), but not stimulus composition (complexity), leads to differential effects when viewing representational paintings in comparison to environmental scenes. We demonstrate that an increase in aesthetic pleasantness induced by representational paintings during a free-viewing task leads to a slower and deeper processing mode than when viewing environmental scenes of motivational relevance, for which we observed the opposite effect. In addition, long presentation durations led to an increase in scanning behavior during visual art perception. These empirical findings inform the debate about how aesthetic experiences differ from everyday perceptual processes by showing that the notion of aesthetic distance may be better understood by examining different modes of viewing.

Social reputation influences on liking and willingness-to-pay for artworks: A multimethod design investigating choice behavior along with physiological measures and motivational factors

Art, as a prestigious cultural commodity, concerns aesthetic and monetary values, personal tastes, and social reputation in various social contexts—all of which are reflected in choices concerning our liking, or in other contexts, our actual willingness-to-pay for artworks. But, how do these different aspects interact in regard to the concept of social reputation and our private versus social selves, which appear to be essentially intervening, and potentially conflicting, factors driving choice? In our study, we investigated liking and willingness-to-pay choices using—in art research—a novel, forced-choice paradigm. Participants (N = 123) made choices from artwork-triplets presented with opposing artistic quality and monetary value-labeling, thereby creating ambiguous choice situations. Choices were made in either private or in social/public contexts, in which participants were made to believe that either art-pricing or art-making experts were watching their selections. A multi-method design with eye-tracking, neuroendocrinology (testosterone, cortisol), and motivational factors complemented the behavioral choice analysis. Results showed that artworks, of which participants were told were of high artistic value were more often liked and those of high monetary-value received more willingness-to-pay choices. However, while willingness-to-pay was significantly affected by the presumed observation of art-pricing experts, liking selections did not differ between private/public contexts. Liking choices, compared to willingness-to-pay, were also better predicted by eye movement patterns. Whereas, hormone levels had a stronger relation with monetary aspects (willingness-to-pay/ art-pricing expert). This was further confirmed by motivational factors representative for reputation seeking behavior. Our study points to an unexplored terrain highlighting the linkage of social reputation mechanisms and its impact on choice behavior with a ubiquitous commodity, art.

Does art reduce pain and stress? A registered report protocol of investigating autonomic and endocrine markers of music, visual art, and multimodal aesthetic experience

The pain- and stress-reducing effects of music are well-known, but the effects of visual art, and the combination of these two, are much less investigated. We aim to (1) investigate the pain- and (2) stress-reducing effects of multimodal (music + visual art) aesthetic experience as we expect this to have stronger effects than a single modal aesthetic experience (music/ visual art), and in an exploratory manner, (3) investigate the underlying mechanisms of aesthetic experience, and the (4) individual differences. In a repeated-measures design (music, visual art, multimodal aesthetic experience, control) participants bring self-selected “movingly beautiful” visual artworks and pieces of music to the lab, where pain and stress are induced by the cold pressor test. Activity of the pain and stress responsive systems are measured by subjective reports, autonomic (electrocardiography, electrodermal activity, salivary alpha-amylase) and endocrine markers (salivary cortisol).

Does Amount of Information Support Aesthetic Values?

Obtaining information from the world is important for survival. The brain, therefore, has special mechanisms to extract as much information as possible from sensory stimuli. Hence, given its importance, the amount of available information may underlie aesthetic values. Such information-based aesthetic values would be significant because they would compete with others to drive decision-making. In this article, we ask, "What is the evidence that amount of information support aesthetic values?" An important concept in the measurement of informational volume is entropy. Research on aesthetic values has thus used Shannon entropy to evaluate the contribution of quantity of information. We review here the concepts of information and aesthetic values, and research on the visual and auditory systems to probe whether the brain uses entropy or other relevant measures, specially, Fisher information, in aesthetic decisions. We conclude that information measures contribute to these decisions in two ways: first, the absolute quantity of information can modulate aesthetic preferences for certain sensory patterns. However, the preference for volume of information is highly individualized, with information-measures competing with organizing principles, such as rhythm and symmetry. In addition, people tend to be resistant to too much entropy, but not necessarily, high amounts of Fisher information. We show that this resistance may stem in part from the distribution of amount of information in natural sensory stimuli. Second, the measurement of entropic-like quantities over time reveal that they can modulate aesthetic decisions by varying degrees of surprise given temporally integrated expectations. We propose that amount of information underpins complex aesthetic values, possibly informing the brain on the allocation of resources or the situational appropriateness of some cognitive models.

Free-Energy Model of Emotion Potential: Modeling Arousal Potential as Information Content Induced by Complexity and Novelty

Appropriate levels of arousal potential induce hedonic responses (i.e., emotional valence). However, the relationship between arousal potential and its factors (e.g., novelty, complexity, and uncertainty) have not been formalized. This paper proposes a mathematical model that explains emotional arousal using minimized free energy to represent information content processed in the brain after sensory stimuli are perceived and recognized (i.e., sensory surprisal). This work mathematically demonstrates that sensory surprisal represents the summation of information from novelty and uncertainty, and that the uncertainty converges to perceived complexity with sufficient sampling from a stimulus source. Novelty, uncertainty, and complexity all act as collative properties that form arousal potential. Analysis using a Gaussian generative model shows that the free energy is formed as a quadratic function of prediction errors based on the difference between prior expectation and peak of likelihood. The model predicts two interaction effects on free energy: that between prediction error and prior uncertainty (i.e., prior variance) and that between prediction error and sensory variance. A discussion on the potential of free energy as a mathematical principle is presented to explain emotion initiators. The model provides a general mathematical framework for understanding and predicting the emotions caused by novelty, uncertainty, and complexity. The mathematical model of arousal can help predict acceptable novelty and complexity based on a target population under different uncertainty levels mitigated by prior knowledge and experience.

Beauty, the feeling

Many philosophers and psychologists have made claims about what is felt in an experience of beauty. Here, we test how well these claims match the feelings that people report while looking at an image, or listening to music, or recalling a personal experience of beauty. We conducted ten experiments (total n = 851) spanning three nations (US, UK, and India). Across nations and modalities, top-rated beauty experiences are strongly characterized by six dimensions: intense pleasure, an impression of universality, the wish to continue the experience, exceeding expectation, perceived harmony in variety, and meaningfulness. Other frequently proposed beauty characteristics - like surprise, desire to understand, and mind wandering - are uncorrelated with feeling beauty. A typical remembered beautiful experience was active and social like a family holiday - hardly ever mentioning beauty - and only rarely mentioned art, unlike the academic emphasis, in aesthetics, on solitary viewing of art. Our survey aligns well with Kant and the psychological theories that emphasize pleasure, and reject theories that emphasize information seeking.

The role of working memory capacity in evaluative judgments of liking and beauty

Judgments of liking and beauty appear to be expressions of a common hedonic state, but they differ in how they engage cognitive processes. We hypothesised that beauty judgments place greater demands on limited executive resources than judgments of liking. We tested this hypothesis by asking two groups of participants to judge works of visual art for their beauty or liking while having to remember the location of 1, 3, or 5 dots in a 4 by 4 matrix. We also examined the effect of individual differences in working memory capacity. Our results show that holding information about the location of the dots in working memory delayed judgments of beauty but not of liking. Also, the greater participants' working memory capacity, the faster they completed the working memory task when judging liking, but not when judging beauty. Our study provides evidence that judging beauty draws more on working memory resources than judging liking.

Evaluative judgment across domains: Liking balance, contour, symmetry and complexity in melodies and visual designs

Evaluative judgment-i.e., assessing to what degree a stimulus is liked or disliked-is a fundamental aspect of cognition, facilitating comparison and choosing among alternatives, deciding, and prioritizing actions. Neuroimaging studies have shown that evaluative judgment involves the projection of sensory information to the reward circuit. To investigate whether evaluative judgments are based on modality-specific or modality-general attributes, we compared the extent to which balance, contour, symmetry, and complexity affect liking responses in the auditory and visual modalities. We found no significant correlation for any of the four attributes across sensory modalities, except for contour. This suggests that evaluative judgments primarily rely on modality-specific sensory representations elaborated in the brain's sensory cortices and relayed to the reward circuit, rather than abstract modality-general representations. The individual traits art experience, openness to experience, and desire for aesthetics were associated with the extent to which design or compositional attributes influenced liking, but inconsistently across sensory modalities and attributes, also suggesting modality-specific influences.

Ecological Art Experience: How We Can Gain Experimental Control While Preserving Ecologically Valid Settings and Contexts

One point that definitions of art experience disagree about is whether this kind of experience is qualitatively different from experiences relating to ordinary objects and everyday contexts. Here, we follow an ecological approach that assumes art experience has its own specific quality, which is, not least, determined by typical contexts of art presentation. Practically, we systematically observe typical phenomena of experiencing art in ecologically valid or real-world settings such as museum contexts. Based on evidence gained in this manner, we emulate and implement essential properties of ecological contexts (e.g., free choice of viewing distance and time, large scale of artworks, and exhibition-like context) in controlled laboratory experiments. We found, for instance, that for large-scale paintings by Pollock and Rothko, preferred viewing distances as well as distances inducing the most intense art experiences - including Aesthetic Aha insights - were much larger than typical viewing distances realized in laboratory studies. Following Carbon's (2019) terminology of measurement strategies of art experience, the combined use of "Path #1" (real-world context) and "Path #2" (mildly controlled, still ecologically valid settings and contexts) enables us to understand and investigate much closer what is really happening when people experience art.

Decomposing Complexity Preferences for Music

Recently, we demonstrated complexity as a major factor for explaining individual differences in visual preferences for abstract digital art. We have shown that participants could best be separated into two groups based on their liking ratings for abstract digital art comprising geometric patterns: one group with a preference for complex visual patterns and another group with a preference for simple visual patterns. In the present study, building up on these results, we extended our investigations for complexity preferences from highly controlled visual stimuli to ecologically valid stimuli in the auditory modality. Similar to visual preferences, we showed that music preferences are highly influenced by stimulus complexity. We demonstrated this by clustering a large number of participants based on their liking ratings for song excerpts from various musical genres. Our results show that, based on their liking ratings, participants can best be separated into two groups: one group with a preference for more complex songs and another group with a preference for simpler songs. Finally, we considered various demographic and personal characteristics to explore differences between the groups, and reported that at least for the current data set age and gender to be significant factors separating the two groups.

The sound of beauty: How complexity determines aesthetic preference

Stimulus complexity is an important determinant of aesthetic preference. An influential idea is that increases in stimulus complexity lead to increased preference up to an optimal point after which preference decreases (inverted-U pattern). However, whereas some studies indeed observed this pattern, most studies instead showed an increased preference for more complexity. One complicating issue is that it remains unclear how to define complexity. To address this, we approached complexity and its relation to aesthetic preference from a predictive coding perspective. Here, low- and high-complexity stimuli would correspond to low and high levels of prediction errors, respectively. We expected participants to prefer stimuli which are neither too easy to predict (low prediction error), nor too difficult (high prediction error). To test this, we presented two sequences of tones on each trial that varied in predictability from highly regular (low prediction error) to completely random (high prediction error), and participants had to indicate which of the two sequences they preferred in a two-interval forced-choice task. The complexity of each tone sequence (amount of prediction error) was estimated using entropy. Results showed that participants tended to choose stimuli with intermediate complexity over those of high or low complexity. This confirms the century-old idea that stimulus complexity has an inverted-U relationship to aesthetic preference.

Representations of naturalistic stimulus complexity in early and associative visual and auditory cortices

The complexity of sensory stimuli has an important role in perception and cognition. However, its neural representation is not well understood. Here, we characterize the representations of naturalistic visual and auditory stimulus complexity in early and associative visual and auditory cortices. This is realized by means of encoding and decoding analyses of two fMRI datasets in the visual and auditory modalities. Our results implicate most early and some associative sensory areas in representing the complexity of naturalistic sensory stimuli. For example, parahippocampal place area, which was previously shown to represent scene features, is shown to also represent scene complexity. Similarly, posterior regions of superior temporal gyrus and superior temporal sulcus, which were previously shown to represent syntactic (language) complexity, are shown to also represent music (auditory) complexity. Furthermore, our results suggest the existence of gradients in sensitivity to naturalistic sensory stimulus complexity in these areas.

Visual Complexity and Affect: Ratings Reflect More Than Meets the Eye

Pictorial stimuli can vary on many dimensions, several aspects of which are captured by the term 'visual complexity.' Visual complexity can be described as, "a picture of a few objects, colors, or structures would be less complex than a very colorful picture of many objects that is composed of several components." Prior studies have reported a relationship between affect and visual complexity, where complex pictures are rated as more pleasant and arousing. However, a relationship in the opposite direction, an effect of affect on visual complexity, is also possible; emotional arousal and valence are known to influence selective attention and visual processing. In a series of experiments, we found that ratings of visual complexity correlated with affective ratings, and independently also with computational measures of visual complexity. These computational measures did not correlate with affect, suggesting that complexity ratings are separately related to distinct factors. We investigated the relationship between affect and ratings of visual complexity, finding an 'arousal-complexity bias' to be a robust phenomenon. Moreover, we found this bias could be attenuated when explicitly indicated but did not correlate with inter-individual difference measures of affective processing, and was largely unrelated to cognitive and eyetracking measures. Taken together, the arousal-complexity bias seems to be caused by a relationship between arousal and visual processing as it has been described for the greater vividness of arousing pictures. The described arousal-complexity bias is also of relevance from an experimental perspective because visual complexity is often considered a variable to control for when using pictorial stimuli.

On Elementary Affective Decisions: To Like Or Not to Like, That Is the Question

Perhaps the most ubiquitous and basic affective decision of daily life is deciding whether we like or dislike something/somebody, or, in terms of psychological emotion theories, whether the object/subject has positive or negative valence. Indeed, people constantly make such liking decisions within a glimpse and, importantly, often without expecting any obvious benefit or knowing the exact reasons for their judgment. In this paper, we review research on such elementary affective decisions (EADs) that entail no direct overt reward with a special focus on Neurocognitive Poetics and discuss methods and models for investigating the neuronal and cognitive-affective bases of EADs to verbal materials with differing degrees of complexity. In line with evolutionary and appraisal theories of (aesthetic) emotions and data from recent neurocognitive studies, the results of a decision tree modeling approach simulating EADs to single words suggest that a main driving force behind EADs is the extent to which such high-dimensional stimuli are associated with the “basic” emotions joy/happiness and disgust.