Empirical aesthetics, the beautiful challenge: An introduction to the special issue on Art &amp; Perception

Augustin, Marc; Wagemans, Johan

doi:10.1068/i0541ed

Cited by 7 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…Aesthetics has more and more become a ‘hot topic’ in psychological literature in the past few years (see, e.g., Augustin & Wagemans, ; Jacobsen, ; Leder & Nadal, ; Redies, ). The exact nature of the processes involved in attraction, rejection, etc., is still relatively unclear, although it is clear that aesthetic experiences involve a complex interplay of cognitive and affective processes assessed by different aesthetic judgements (Leder, Belke, Oeberst, & Augustin, ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beauty in the blink of an eye: The time course of aesthetic experiences

Verhavert

Wagemans

Augustin

2017

British J of Psychology

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Under normal circumstances, perception runs very fast and seemingly automatic. In just a few ms, we go from sensory features to perceiving objects. This fast time course does not only apply to general perceptual aspects but also to what we call higher-level judgements. Inspired by the study on 'very first impressions' by Bar, Neta, and Linz (2006, Emotion, 6, 269) the current research examined the speed and time course of three aspects of the aesthetic experience, namely beauty, specialness, and impressiveness. Participants were presented with 54 reproductions of paintings that covered a wide variety of artistic styles and contents. Presentation times were 10, 50, 100 and 500 ms in Experiment 1 and 20, 30 and 40 ms in Experiment 2. Our results not only show that consistent aesthetic judgements can be formed based on very brief glances of information, but that this speed of aesthetic impression formation also differs between different aesthetic judgements. Apparently, impressiveness judgements require longer exposure times than impressions of beauty or specialness. The results provide important evidence for our understanding of the time course of aesthetic experiences.From the moment we open our eyes, we clearly see the world around us and quickly extract information and meaning from it. Studies have found that when presented with real-world images, people are able to detect objects based on presentations as short as 50 ms and to recognize objects after only about 100 ms of presentation (see, e.g., Fei-Fei, Iyer, Koch, & Perona, 2007;Grill-Spector & Kanwisher, 2005). However, this fast processing comprises different stages. For example, Fei-Fei et al. (2007) found that before 40 ms, sensory-related features (light-dark) are dominant for people's perception of stimuli, while from around 50 ms of presentation, a shift to more object-related features occurs. Subjects are able to name very general object categories like manmade objects ('furniture', 'desk') and gradually get more detailed and accurate over time (Fei-Fei et al., 2007). Such a coarse-to-fine development of percepts has been found in many psychophysical studies (for a review, see Hegde, 2008) and is a core characteristic of the percept formation or microgenesis (Bachmann, 2000). What subjects perceive increases in detail the longer they see it, even if the image does not change. This happens on a very fast timescale (Fei-Fei et al., 2007;Hegde, 2008). A very vivid illustration that such speed and differentiated time course do not pertain only to general perceptual and identification aspects, such as colour or object category, but also to judgemental aspects *Correspondence should be addressed to M. Dorothee Augustin, Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, KU Leuven, Tiensestraat 102, box 3711, 3000 Leuven, Belgium (email: mdorothee.augustin@posteo.de). San Verhavert has moved since this study was undertaken and is now based at Department of Training and Educational Sciences, Research group Edubron, University of Antwerp, Gratiekapelstraat 10, 2000 Antwe...

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beauty in the blink of an eye: The time course of aesthetic experiences

Verhavert

Wagemans

Augustin

2017

British J of Psychology

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“…Second, the paintings were presented on a computer screen in a laboratory. The experience of viewing a painting in a museum cannot be wholly duplicated with a screen in a laboratory (Augustin & Wagemans, 2012; Brieber et al, 2015; Locher et al, 1999). Because visual perception is significantly more sophisticated and complex in the real world than in an experimental paradigm, our findings still need to be validated in the ecological setting of an art museum.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Eyes can tell: Assessment of implicit attitudes toward AI art

Zhou,

Kawabata

2023

i-Perception

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Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have significantly improved the abilities of machines. Human-unique abilities, such as art creation, are now being challenged by AI. Recent studies have investigated and compared people's attitudes toward human-made and AI-generated artworks. These results suggest that a negative bias may exist toward the latter. However, none of these previous studies has examined the extent of this bias. In this study, we investigate whether a bias against AI art can be found at an implicit level. Viewers’ attitudes toward AI art were assessed using eye-tracking measures and subjective aesthetic evaluations. Visual attention and aesthetic judgments were compared between artworks categorized as human-made and AI-made. The results showed that although it was difficult for individuals to identify AI-generated artwork, they exhibited an implicit prejudice against AI art. Participants looked longer at paintings that they thought were made by humans. No significant effect of categorization of paintings was found in subjective evaluations. These findings suggest that although human and AI art may be perceived as having similar aesthetic values, an implicit negative bias toward AI art exists. Although AI can now perform creative tasks, artistic creativity is still considered a human prerogative.

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“…In other arts-sciences crossover fields, the ratio of scientists to humanities scholars can be quite different: "empirical aesthetics" with visual art as its object of study, for example, attracts as many psychologists, physiologists, and neuroscientists, especially those working on visual perception (e.g. Huang et al 2011, Augustin andWagemans 2012), as it does fine artists or art historians, if not more. But the research tends nonetheless to be configured very much as a means of generating insights about aesthetic objects and experiences rather than also as a way of reflecting back on to the cognitive faculties with which these art forms interact.…”

Section: ***mentioning

confidence: 99%

Mind, brain, and literature: A dialogue on what the humanities might offer the cognitive sciences

Burke

Troscianko

2013

Journal of Literary Semantics

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There are many obvious ways in which the cognitive sciences -disciplines such as psychology, neuroscience, cognitive linguistics, and philosophy of mind -have the potential to enrich literary studies. These disciplines can make substantial contributions to how literary scholars understand processes of textual creation and reception, as well as textually evoked cognition. What is not always so clear is what the cognitive sciences get out of such interdisciplinary exchange: is there really a two-way exchange, or do the benefits flow primarily in one direction?We suggest that while cognitive science has already proved its value in helping us understand literature better, it should not be perceived by researchers in cognitive literary studies as a knight in shining armour with nothing to gain for itself from the encounter with literary studies. We believe that the study of literature from a cognitive perspective has the potential to be valuable to cognitive scientists in a number of ways, and that it is important that cognitive scientists start to pose research questions which make use of insights and methods from literary studies. Making this happen requires more than a passive wait-andsee attitude on the part of cognitive literary studies; it requires a proactive asking of the question "what might cognitive scientists want to get from such an exchange?"We see a number of possibilities for answering this question. Firstly, the activities of creating and enjoying storytelling have always been part of human culture, so evolutionary literary studies has the potential to illuminate a central facet of what it means to be human, precisely through cognitive-textual analysis Brought to you by | St. Petersburg State University Authenticated | 134.99.128.41 Download Date | 12/11/13 4:59 PM

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Empirical aesthetics, the beautiful challenge: An introduction to the special issue on Art & Perception

Cited by 7 publications

References 24 publications

Beauty in the blink of an eye: The time course of aesthetic experiences

Beauty in the blink of an eye: The time course of aesthetic experiences

Eyes can tell: Assessment of implicit attitudes toward AI art

Mind, brain, and literature: A dialogue on what the humanities might offer the cognitive sciences

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