Perceptual fluency effects in judgments of creativity and beauty: creative objects are perceived fluently yet they are visually complex

Christensen, Bo T.; Ball, Linden J.; Reber, Rolf

doi:10.1080/20445911.2019.1689986

Cited by 10 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 58 publications

(77 reference statements)

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“…The relative salience of the three forms of appreciation will depend on goals and circumstances, and within empirical research, it will vary according to task demands (Chmiel & Schubert, 2019). Forms of appreciation may also depend on processing fluency: how readily perceptual input can be assimilated into existing schemata (Berlyne, 1971; Bullot, 2020; Bullot & Reber, 2013a, 2013b; Christensen et al, 2020). When individuals can readily assimilate perceptual input, they may incorporate their experience into existing structural knowledge of music, reducing the motivation to consider nonstructural aspects of the stimulus.…”

Section: Investigating Forms Of Appreciation In Conjunctionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The psychological basis of music appreciation: Structure, self, source.

Thompson¹,

Bullot²,

Margulis³

2023

Psychological Review

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Research has investigated psychological processes in an attempt to explain how and why people appreciate music. Three programs of research have shed light on these processes. The first focuses on the appreciation of musical structure. The second investigates self-oriented responses to music, including music-evoked autobiographical memories, the reinforcement of a sense of self, and benefits to individual health and wellbeing. The third seeks to explain how music listeners become sensitive to the causal and contextual sources of music making, including the biomechanics of performance, knowledge of musicians and their intentions, and the cultural and historical context of music making. To date, these programs of research have been carried out with little interaction, and the third program has been omitted from most psychological enquiries into music appreciation. In this paper, we review evidence for these three forms of appreciation. The evidence reviewed acknowledges the enormous diversity in antecedents and causes of music appreciation across contexts, individuals, cultures, and historical periods. We identify the inputs and outputs of appreciation, propose processes that influence the forms that appreciation can take, and make predictions for future research. Evidence for source sensitivity is emphasized because the topic has been largely unacknowledged in previous discussions. This evidence implicates a set of unexplored processes that bring to mind causal and contextual details associated with music, and that shape our appreciation of music in important ways.

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Section: Investigating Forms Of Appreciation In Conjunctionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The psychological basis of music appreciation: Structure, self, source.

Thompson¹,

Bullot²,

Margulis³

2023

Psychological Review

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“…Complexity has been prominently featured in research on aesthetic judgments since the early beginnings of the subject (Berlyne, 1970; Birkhoff, 1933; Fechner, 1876). To date, the findings on the relation between complexity and aesthetic judgments are mixed, and this may be due to individual differences in the direction of the relation between complexity and aesthetic value judgments (Corradi et al, 2020; Jacobsen & Höfel, 2002; Lyssenko et al, 2016; Sherman et al, 2015; Street et al, 2016), types of complexity manipulations (Christensen et al, 2020; Nadal et al, 2010), and stimulus type (Marin et al, 2016; Mayer & Landwehr, 2018). Partially, these inconsistencies might be related to differences in subjectively perceived versus objectively measured complexity (Sherman et al, 2015).…”

Section: Existing Empirical Findingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A computational model of aesthetic value.

Brielmann¹,

Dayan²

2022

Psychological Review

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People invest precious time and resources on experiences such as watching movies or listening to music. Yet, we still have a poor understanding of how such sensed experiences gain aesthetic value. We propose a model of aesthetic value that integrates existing theories with literature on conventional primary and secondary rewards such as food and money. We assume that the states of observers' sensory and cognitive systems adapt to process stimuli effectively in both the present and the future. These system states collectively comprise a probabilistic generative model of stimuli in the environment. Two interlinked components generate value: immediate sensory reward and the change in expected future reward. An immediate sensory reward is taken as the fluency with which a stimulus is processed, quantified by the likelihood of that stimulus given an observer's state. The change in expected future reward is taken as the change in fluency with which likely future stimuli will be processed. It is quantified by the change in the divergence between the observer's system state and the distribution of stimuli that the observer expects to see over the long term. Simulations show that a simple version of the model can account for empirical data on the effects of exposure, complexity, and symmetry on aesthetic value judgments. Taken together, our model melds processing fluency theories (immediate reward) and learning theories (change in expected future reward). Its application offers insight as to how the interplay of immediate processing fluency and learning gives rise to aesthetic value judgments.

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“…Testing this possibility, Christensen et al. (2020) obtained mixed results across seven experiments with different fluency manipulations. Easy processing increased judgments of beauty as well as creativity when fluency was manipulated through exposure frequency or figure‐ground contrast, whereas high prototypicality increased judgments of beauty without influencing judgments of creativity.…”

Section: Fluency and Beauty: Esthetic Appreciation Pleasure And Engmentioning

confidence: 99%

Metacognitive experiences as information: Processing fluency in consumer judgment and decision making

Schwarz

Jalbert

Noah

et al. 2020

Consumer Psychology Review

100

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Thinking is accompanied by metacognitive experiences of ease or difficulty. People draw on these experiences as a source of information that can complement or challenge the implications of declarative information. We conceptualize the operation of metacognitive experiences within the framework of feelings‐as‐information theory and review their implications for judgments relevant to consumer behavior, including popularity, trust, risk, truth, and beauty.

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Perceptual fluency effects in judgments of creativity and beauty: creative objects are perceived fluently yet they are visually complex

Cited by 10 publications

References 58 publications

The psychological basis of music appreciation: Structure, self, source.

The psychological basis of music appreciation: Structure, self, source.

A computational model of aesthetic value.

Metacognitive experiences as information: Processing fluency in consumer judgment and decision making

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