Aesthetics of streetscapes: influence of fundamental properties on aesthetic judgments of urban space

This experiment was designed to investigate the relationship between the fundamental visual, spatial properties of existing complex streetscapes and aesthetic judgments. Participants performed aesthetic judgments over 35 photographs of typical spatial situations taken along the Meissner Strasse in Radebeul, Germany. In a modified Q-Sort procedure, the participants assigned the pictures to five categories, including 1 (beautiful) and 5 (not beautiful). Vegetation, Stylistic Uniformity, Homogeneity of Scale, and Symmetry were identified as primary components of aesthetic judgment by using principal component analysis. Stimuli, photographically edited according to these factors, were then tested using the same Q-Sort procedure, which confirmed these determinants. These results are intended to help the development of the theoretical understanding of the link between the influence of selected spatial properties and the aesthetic judgment of the visual quality of urban spaces.     

On the interdependence of temporal and spatial judgments

Three experiments are reported on the tau and kappa effects, the dependence of judgments of distance upon duration (tau) and of judgments of duration upon distance (kappa). In Experiment 1, three lights in a horizontal sequence were used to define two temporal and two spatial intervals over a total duration of 160 msec. The subject was required to choose the shorter of either the two durations or the two distances. The results confirmed Collyer’s (1977) findings that the two effects are inconsistently observed across subjects when the display duration is brief. In Experiment 2, display duration was systematically manipulated from 160 to 1,500 msec. It is argued that relative temporal judgments should become easier as the total display duration is increased and that, hence, the kappa effect should become less marked. On the other hand, relative spatial judgments should become more difficult as the total duration of the display is increased, and the tau effect should become more marked. The data were in conformity with the hypothesis. In Experiment 3, data are presented for a tau experiment which fit the assumption that the effect depends upon a weighted average of distance and the expected distance which would be traversed in the given time at constant velocity.     

A model of aesthetic appreciation and aesthetic judgments

Although aesthetic experiences are frequent in modern life, there is as of yet no scientifically comprehensive theory that explains what psychologically constitutes such experiences. These experiences are particularly interesting because of their hedonic properties and the possibility to provide self‐rewarding cognitive operations. We shall explain why modern art's large number of individualized styles, innovativeness and conceptuality offer positive aesthetic experiences. Moreover, the challenge of art is mainly driven by a need for understanding. Cognitive challenges of both abstract art and other conceptual, complex and multidimensional stimuli require an extension of previous approaches to empirical aesthetics. We present an information‐processing stage model of aesthetic processing. According to the model, aesthetic experiences involve five stages: perception, explicit classification, implicit classification, cognitive mastering and evaluation. The model differentiates between aesthetic emotion and aesthetic judgments as two types of output.     

Discrimination of spatial and temporal intervals defined by three light flashes: Effects of spacing on temporal judgments and of timing on spatial judgments

Observers were presented stimulus patterns consisting of a sequence of three laterally displaced light flashes, which defined two spatial intervals and two temporal intervals. The position and time of the second flash were varied factorially, and observers were asked to make relative judgments of either the two spatial intervals or the two temporal intervals. “Induction” effects of stimulus timing on spatial judgments and of stimulus spacing on temporal judgments were both found; however, the directionality of these effects differed between subjects. The results are inconsistent with the hypothesis, derived from previous findings, that such effects are determined primarily by a tendency toward perceiving constant velocity of apparent motion; it is proposed that the directionality of the induction effects is determined largely by the strategy adopted by the observer for combining spatial and temporal stimulus information.     

Judgments about judgments: the dissociation of consideration price and transaction commitment judgments

There are many contexts in which people make judgments about prior judgments. For example, Internet shopping bots (e.g., NexTag.com) allow consumers to search for products and, if the price is too high, list a price at which they would consider making the purchase (i.e., base judgment). If the price drops to this level, the vendor generates an e-mail inviting the consumer to execute the transaction at the reduced price (i.e., contingent judgment). The authors show that the consideration price depends on the content of retrieved information, whereas the willingness to execute the transaction at the consideration price depends on the ease-of-retrieving the information. The authors use different offer prices to encourage the consumer to retrieve information consistent with different product quality levels. The authors also select offer prices so that information retrieval is more difficult at moderate offer prices than at high or low offer prices. Accordingly, the authors show that the consideration price increases as the offer price increases, but the willingness to execute the transaction at the consideration price is greater when there are high and low, as opposed to moderate, offer prices.     

Bigger is better: the influence of physical size on aesthetic preference judgments

The hypothesis that the physical size of an object can influence aesthetic preferences was investigated. In a series of four experiments, participants were presented with pairs of abstract stimuli and asked to indicate which member of each pair they preferred. A preference for larger stimuli was found on the majority of trials using various types of stimuli, stimuli of various sizes, and with both adult and 3‐year‐old participants. This preference pattern was disrupted only when participants had both stimuli that provided a readily accessible alternative source of preference‐evoking information and sufficient attentional resources to make their preference judgments. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Eye color and judgments of aesthetic value of shapes.

47 university students provided judgments of the aesthetic value of polygon and histogram shapes that were either symmetric or asymmetric. A sigificant over-all preference to symmetric shapes was evident (p less than .05), and judgments were significantly more positive for brown-eyed subjects. Furthermore, the aesthetic values assigned to shapes showed a systematic interaction with eye color such that brown-eyed subjects produced higher aesthetic ratings for symmetric shapes than blue-eyed subjects, while no such differences appeared for asymmetric shapes.     

The malleable bicultural consumer: effects of cultural contexts on aesthetic judgments

• Grounded in the cognitive framework of processing fluency, this study proposes further support for the experiential perspective in aesthetics by positing that aesthetic response to the same object may be malleable, depending on how the symbolic properties of the object interact with different cultural contexts which either facilitate or debilitate the processing experience of the perceiver. The study employed an Internet experiment to test the hypotheses among 105 female Hispanic college‐aged students enrolled at a large midwestern university. The findings revealed that symbolic attributes of products interact with cultural contexts to affect aesthetic judgments of (Hispanic) consumers. Aesthetic judgments were more positive when evaluating culturally symbolic product attributes after exposure to congruent contextual cues that facilitate fluent processing. The study furnishes support for the impact of environment/context on consumer behavior and aesthetic judgment, thus establishing further support for the cognitive framework of conceptual fluency in explaining aesthetic response. The study also contributes to recent literature on “frame‐switching” among bicultural consumers by suggesting that these consumers navigate between competing cultural frames in response to visual primes, with resultant shifts in aesthetic judgments. Important marketing insights emerge from these findings.

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Facial affect and temporal order judgments: emotions turn back the clock

The influence of facial affect on the perception of temporal order was examined in the context of the temporal order judgment (TOJ) paradigm. Two schematic faces were presented either simultaneously, or separated by varying stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs; -100 ms, -34 ms, -17 ms, 17 ms, 34 ms, 100 ms), and participants had to judge which face appeared first. Each schematic face displayed one of three emotions; happy, neutral, or angry. Facial affect was found to influence judgments of temporal order at short SOAs (-17 ms, 0 ms, and 17 ms) but not at the longest SOAs (-100 ms and 100 ms), consistent with the hypothesis that facial affect influences relative onset judgments when they are difficult to make.     

Inhibition and disinhibition of return: Evidence from temporal order judgments

In the present study the temporal order judgment (TOJ) task was used to investigate whether or not inhibition of return (IOR) affects perceptual processing. Previous failures to obtain IOR in the TOJ task have been taken to suggest that IOR does not affect perceptual processing (e.g., Maylor, 1985). The present study showed that IOR is modulated by the temporal disparity between successive targets as well as the relative order in which they appear at cued and uncued locations. Consequently, IOR affects TOJs in some conditions but not in others. The selective occurrence of IOR in the TOJ task provides converging support for the notion that IOR does affect perceptual processing, and also accounts for the previous failures to observe IOR in the TOJ task. Moreover, these and other results suggest that inhibitory processing at the cued location can be dis-inhibited when stimulation occurs at other locations.     

Construal level and temporal judgments of the past: the moderating role of knowledge

The vast majority of work in construal level theory has found a robust relationship between construal level and temporal judgments for future events: Distance is associated with the abstract, and nearness is associated with the concrete. Our work looks at the past and proposes a critical moderator that reverses this relationship: knowledge. Through experiments involving real news events, we demonstrate that people with less knowledge about events felt nearer to them when recalling them in a concrete mindset versus an abstract one. However, this relationship reverses for those with greater knowledge: They feel closer to past events when recalling them in an abstract mindset versus a concrete one. We provide evidence that this reversal stems from feelings of metacognitive ease that inform temporal judgments when knowledge (which drives what information is held available and accessible in memory) and construal mindset (which drives what information is sought from memory) coincide. Our findings suggest that in memory, there are instances where the abstract seems near and the concrete seems distant.     

Making judgments about ability: the role of implicit theories of ability in moderating inferences from temporal and social comparison information

Two studies examined the novel proposal that implicit theories of intelligence (C. S. Dweck & E. L. Leggett, 1988) moderate both the effects of performance trends on ability inferences and the perceived diagnosticity of temporal versus normative feedback. Results from 613 adolescents and 42 teachers confirmed that entity theorists perceived initial outcome as more diagnostic and inferred higher ability in another (Study 1) and in the self (Study 2) in a declining outcome condition; incremental theorists perceived last outcome as more diagnostic and inferred higher ability in an ascending condition. Experimental induction of beliefs about ability had similar effects. As predicted, self-appraisal was affected more by temporal feedback among incremental theorists and by normative feedback among entity theorists. Results help resolve prior mixed findings regarding order effects and responses to temporal and normative evaluation.     

Word recognition and temporal order judgments: semantics turns back the clock.

This paper examines the consequences that codes activated during reading have on activities unrelated to reading by investigating the effects of semantics on temporal order judgments. Participants judged which of two word targets appeared first. Targets appeared either synchronously, or were separated by varying stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). For one group of participants, one target on each trial was related to a prime word shown at the beginning of the trial. This priming relation affected temporal order judgments such that participants sometimes reported related targets as having appeared first, even when they appeared second. It is suggested that this effect is best explained as showing that codes activated during word recognition affect the attentional selection aspects of the temporal order judgment task.     

Contiception: A program to study the effects of contingency parameters on judgments of control

Little is known about the heuristics people use in evaluating the degree to which they control events. The DOS-basedContiception program allows users to independently set the extent to which subjects’ actions are necessary and sufficient (the two components of contingency) to cause a change in an animated display. Up to four subject actions (keypresses) can each cause up to four dimensions of the display to change according to independently set contingencies. The task within which subjects judge their control involves interacting with the display in real time. To facilitate modeling of the possible algorithms used by different groups of subjects or under different conditions, the program provides several calculations of contingency magnitude and algebraic rules upon which the literature suggests subjects might base their control judgments. The program also allows sessions (trial sequences) to be saved and provides raw and summarized data output.     

Visual position discrimination: A model relating temporal and spatial factors

Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics - This paper presents a decision theory model of the perceptual processes by which an observer compares two visual stimuli presented at different points...     

Temporal stability and consistency of aesthetic judgments of beauty of formal graphic patterns

Temporal stability and consistency of nonartists' aesthetic judgments of beauty of formal graphic patterns was assessed. Temporal stability decreased markedly over several months. When items were repeated in an aesthetic judgment task participants responded consistently over trials rather than performing genuine repeated aesthetic judgments of beauty.