Modelling individual aesthetic judgements over time.

Listening to music, watching a sunset-many sensory experiences are valuable to us, to a degree that differs significantly between individuals, and within an individual over time. We have theorized (Brielmann & Dayan 2022 Psychol. Rev. 129, 1319-1337 (doi:10.1037/rev0000337))) that these idiosyncratic values derive from the task of using experiences to tune the sensory-cognitive system to current and likely future input. We tested the theory using participants' (n = 59) ratings of a set of dog images (n = 55) created using the NeuralCrossbreed morphing algorithm. A full realization of our model that uses feature representations extracted from image-recognizing deep neural nets (e.g. VGG-16) is able to capture liking judgements on a trial-by-trial basis (median r = 0.65), outperforming predictions based on population averages (median r = 0.01). Furthermore, the model's learning component allows it to explain image sequence dependent rating changes, capturing on average 17% more variance in the ratings for the true trial order than for simulated random trial orders. This validation of our theory is the first step towards a comprehensive treatment of individual differences in evaluation. This article is part of the theme issue 'Art, aesthetics and predictive processing: theoretical and empirical perspectives'.

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.

A computational model of aesthetic value.

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. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

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 pleasure of multiple images.

How many pleasures can you track? In a previous study, we showed that people can simultaneously track the pleasure they experience from two images. Here, we push further, probing the individual and combined pleasures felt from seeing four images in one glimpse. Participants (N = 25) viewed 36 images spanning the entire range of pleasure. Each trial presented an array of four images, one in each quadrant of the screen, for 200 ms. On 80% of the trials, a central line cue pointed, randomly, at some screen corner either before (precue) or after (postcue) the images were shown. The cue indicated which image (the target) to rate while ignoring the others (distractors). On the other 20% of trials, an X cue requested a rating of the combined pleasure of all four images. Later, for baseline reference, we obtained a single-pleasure rating for each image shown alone. When precued, participants faithfully reported the pleasure of the target. When postcued, however, the mean ratings of images that are intensely pleasurable when seen alone (pleasure >4.5 on a 1-9 scale) dropped below baseline. Regardless of cue timing, the rating of the combined pleasure of four images was a linear transform of the average baseline pleasures of all four images. Thus, while people can faithfully track two pleasures, they cannot track four. Instead, the pleasure of otherwise above-medium-pleasure images is diminished, mimicking the effect of a distracting task.

Tracking two pleasures.

Can people track several pleasures? In everyday life, pleasing stimuli rarely appear in isolation. Yet, experiments on aesthetic pleasure usually present only one image at a time. Here, we ask whether people can reliably report the pleasure of either of two images seen in a single glimpse. Participants (N = 13 in the original; +25 in the preregistered replication) viewed 36 Open Affective Standardized Image Set (OASIS) images that span the entire range of pleasure and beauty. On each trial, the observer saw two images, side by side, for 200 ms. An arrow cue pointed, randomly, left, right, or bidirectionally. Left or right indicated which image (the target) to rate while ignoring the other (the distractor); bidirectional requested rating the combined pleasure of both images. In half the blocks, the cue came before the images (precuing). Otherwise, it came after (postcuing). Precuing allowed the observer to ignore the distractor, while postcuing demanded tracking both images. Finally, we obtained single-pleasure ratings for each image shown alone. Our replication confirms the original study. People have unbiased access to their felt pleasure from each image and the average of both. Furthermore, the variance of the observer's report is similar whether reporting the pleasure of one image or the average pleasure of two. The undiminished variance for reports of the average pleasure of two images indicates either that the underlying pleasure variances are highly correlated, or, more likely, that the variance arises in the common reporting process. In brief, observers can faithfully track at least two visual pleasures.

Intense Beauty Requires Intense Pleasure.

At the beginning of psychology, Fechner (1876) claimed that beauty is immediate pleasure, and that an object's pleasure determines its value. In our earlier work, we found that intense pleasure always results in intense beauty. Here, we focus on the inverse: Is intense pleasure necessary for intense beauty? If so, the inability to experience pleasure (anhedonia) should prevent the experience of intense beauty. We asked 757 online participants to rate how intensely they felt beauty from each image. We used 900 OASIS images along with their available valence (pleasure vs. displeasure) and arousal ratings. We then obtained self-reports of anhedonia (TEPS), mood, and depression (PHQ-9). Across images, beauty ratings were closely related to pleasure ratings (r = 0.75), yet unrelated to arousal ratings. Only images with an average pleasure rating above 4 (of a possible 7) often achieved (>10%) beauty averages exceeding the overall median beauty. For normally beautiful images (average rating > 4.5), the beauty ratings were correlated with anhedonia (r ∼-0.3) and mood (r ∼ 0.3), yet unrelated to depression. Comparing each participant's average beauty rating to the overall median (5.0), none of the most anhedonic participants exceeded the median, whereas 50% of the remaining participants did. Thus, both general and anhedonic results support the claim that intense beauty requires intense pleasure. In addition, follow-up repeated measures showed that shared taste contributed 19% to beauty-rating variance, only one third as much as personal taste (58%). Addressing age-old questions, these results indicate that beauty is a kind of pleasure, and that beauty is more personal than universal, i.e., 1.7 times more correlated with individual than with shared taste.

Aesthetics.

Our everyday lives are full of aesthetic experiences. We wake up and frown at an overcast sky, or smile at the sight of the sun. Myriad decisions depend on the aesthetic appeal of the available options like which shirt to wear, which route to take to work, or where to eat. Even life-changing decisions, like where to live or who to live with, are partly based on their aesthetic appeal.

Beauty at a glance: The feeling of beauty and the amplitude of pleasure are independent of stimulus duration.

Over time, how does beauty develop and decay? Common sense suggests that beauty is intensely felt only after prolonged experience of the object. Here, we present one of various stimuli for a variable duration (1-30 s), measure the observers' pleasure over time, and, finally, ask whether they felt beauty. On each trial, participants (N = 21) either see an image that they had chosen as "movingly beautiful," see an image with prerated valence, or suck a candy. During the stimulus and a further 60 s, participants rate pleasure continuously using a custom touchscreen web app, EmotionTracker.com. After each trial, participants judge whether they felt beauty. Across all stimulus kinds, durations, and beauty responses, the dynamic pleasure rating has a stereotypical time course that is well fit by a one-parameter model with a brief exponential onset (roughly 2.5 s), a sustained plateau during stimulus presentation, and a long exponential decay (roughly 70 s). Across conditions, only the plateau amplitude varies. Beauty and pleasure amplitude are nearly independent of stimulus duration. The final beauty rating is positively correlated with pleasure amplitude (r = 0.60), and nearly independent of duration (r = 0.10). Beauty's independence from duration is unlike Bentham's 18th-century notion of value (utility), which he supposed to depend on the product of pleasure amplitude and duration. Participants report having felt pleasure as strongly after a mere 1 s stimulus as after longer durations, up to 30 s. Thus, we find that amplitude of pleasure is independent of stimulus duration.

Beauty Requires Thought.

The experience of beauty is a pleasure, but common sense and philosophy suggest that feeling beauty differs from sensuous pleasures such as eating or sex. Immanuel Kant [1, 2] claimed that experiencing beauty requires thought but that sensuous pleasure can be enjoyed without thought and cannot be beautiful. These venerable hypotheses persist in models of aesthetic processing [3-7] but have never been tested. Here, participants continuously rated the pleasure felt from a nominally beautiful or non-beautiful stimulus and then judged whether they had experienced beauty. The stimuli, which engage various senses, included seeing images, tasting candy, and touching a teddy bear. The observer reported the feelings that the stimulus evoked. The time course of pleasure, across stimuli, is well-fit by a model with one free parameter: pleasure amplitude. Pleasure amplitude increases linearly with the feeling of beauty. To test Kant's claim of a need for thought, we reduce cognitive capacity by adding a "two-back" task to distract the observer's thoughts. The distraction greatly reduces the beauty and pleasure experienced from stimuli that otherwise produce strong pleasure and spares that of less-pleasant stimuli. We also find that strong pleasure is always beautiful, whether produced reliably by beautiful stimuli or just occasionally by sensuous stimuli. In sum, we confirm Kant's claim that only the pleasure associated with feeling beauty requires thought and disprove his claim that sensuous pleasures cannot be beautiful.

Man, You Might Look Like a Woman-If a Child Is Next to You.

Gender categorization seems prone to a pervasive bias: Persons about whom null or ambiguous gender information is available are more often considered male than female. Our study assessed whether such a male-bias is present in non-binary choice tasks and whether it can be altered by social contextual information. Participants were asked to report their perception of an adult figure's gender in three context conditions: (1) alone, (2) passively besides a child, or (3) actively helping a child (n = 10 pictures each). The response options male, female and I don't know were provided. As a result, participants attributed male gender to most figures and rarely used the I don't know option in all conditions, but were more likely to attribute female gender to the same adult figure if it was shown with a child. If such social contextual information was provided in the first rather than the second block of the experiment, subsequent female gender attributions increased for adult figures shown alone. Additionally, female gender attributions for actively helping relative to passive adults were made more often. Thus, we provide strong evidence that gender categorization can be altered by social context even if the subject of gender categorization remains identical.

Does it matter how you ask? Self-reported emotions to depictions of need-of-help and social context.

BACKGROUND: When humans observe other people's emotions they not only can relate but also experience similar affective states. This capability is seen as a precondition for helping and other prosocial behaviors. Our study aims to quantify the influence of help-related picture content on subjectively experienced affect. It also assesses the impact of different scales on the way people rate their emotional state. METHODS: The participants (N=242) of this study were shown stimuli with help-related content. In the first subset, half the drawings depicted a child or a bird needing help to reach a simple goal. The other drawings depicted situations where the goal was achieved. The second subset showed adults either actively helping a child or as passive bystanders. We created control conditions by including pictures of the adults on their own. Participants were asked to report their affective responses to the stimuli using two types of 9-point scales. For one half of the pictures, scales of arousal (calm to excited) and of bipolar valence (unhappy to happy) were employed; for the other half, unipolar scales of pleasantness and unpleasantness (strong to absent) were used. RESULTS: Even non-dramatic depictions of simple need-of-help situations were rated systematically lower in valence, higher in arousal, less pleasant and more unpleasant than corresponding pictures with the child or bird not needing help. The presence of a child and adult together increased pleasantness ratings compared to pictures in which they were depicted alone. Arousal was lower for pictures showing only an adult than for those including a child. Depictions of active helping were rated similarly to pictures showing a passive adult bystander, when the need-of-help was resolved. Aggregated unipolar pleasantness and unpleasantness ratings accounted well for arousal and even better for bipolar valence ratings and for content effects on them. CONCLUSION: This is the first study to report upon the meaningful impact of harmless need-of-help content on self-reported emotional experience. It provides the basis for further investigating the links between subjective emotional experience and active prosocial behavior. It also builds upon recent findings on the correspondence between emotional ratings on bipolar and unipolar scales.

Effects of reward on the accuracy and dynamics of smooth pursuit eye movements.

Reward modulates behavioral choices and biases goal-oriented behavior, such as eye or hand movements, toward locations or stimuli associated with higher rewards. We investigated reward effects on the accuracy and timing of smooth pursuit eye movements in 4 experiments. Eye movements were recorded in participants tracking a moving visual target on a computer monitor. Before target motion onset, a monetary reward cue indicated whether participants could earn money by tracking accurately, or whether the trial was unrewarded (Experiments 1 and 2, n = 11 each). Reward significantly improved eye-movement accuracy across different levels of task difficulty. Improvements were seen even in the earliest phase of the eye movement, within 70 ms of tracking onset, indicating that reward impacts visual-motor processing at an early level. We obtained similar findings when reward was not precued but explicitly associated with the pursuit target (Experiment 3, n = 16); critically, these results were not driven by stimulus prevalence or other factors such as preparation or motivation. Numerical cues (Experiment 4, n = 9) were not effective.

Looking at faces from different angles: Europeans fixate different features in Asian and Caucasian faces.

Race categorization of faces is a fast and automatic process and is known to affect further face processing profoundly and at earliest stages. Whether processing of own- and other-race faces might rely on different facial cues, as indicated by diverging viewing behavior, is much under debate. We therefore aimed to investigate two open questions in our study: (1) Do observers consider information from distinct facial features informative for race categorization or do they prefer to gain global face information by fixating the geometrical center of the face? (2) Does the fixation pattern, or, if facial features are considered relevant, do these features differ between own- and other-race faces? We used eye tracking to test where European observers look when viewing Asian and Caucasian faces in a race categorization task. Importantly, in order to disentangle centrally located fixations from those towards individual facial features, we presented faces in frontal, half-profile and profile views. We found that observers showed no general bias towards looking at the geometrical center of faces, but rather directed their first fixations towards distinct facial features, regardless of face race. However, participants looked at the eyes more often in Caucasian faces than in Asian faces, and there were significantly more fixations to the nose for Asian compared to Caucasian faces. Thus, observers rely on information from distinct facial features rather than facial information gained by centrally fixating the face. To what extent specific features are looked at is determined by the face's race.

Does anyone need help? Age and gender effects on children's ability to recognize need-of-help.

The exploratory study presented here examines children's ability to recognize another person's need-of-help. This social perception process necessarily precedes the decision to actively help others. Fifty-eight children aged between 5 and 13 completed three experimental paradigms. They were asked to look at black-and-white drawings and to indicate which ones showed somebody in need of help. A control task requiring children to differentiate between pictures of humans and birds measured general categorization abilities. This experimental design enabled us to consider confounding effects of children's developmental status and motivation and to distinguish them from specific need-of-help recognition abilities. As gender and age have been shown to influence social perception as well as helping behavior, we explored whether these factors also have an impact on need-of-help recognition. Children's response accuracies and response times (RTs) were analyzed. We observed clearly higher accuracy rates for younger girls compared to younger boys specifically in the need-of-help recognition tasks. For boys, an age-related performance improvement was found. Younger girls performed at a similarly high level as older girls and boys. No gender differences were observed for children aged over nine. This report provides first evidence that the developmental trajectory of children's ability to recognize another person's need-of-help differs for girls and boys.

A new standardized stimulus set for studying need-of-help recognition (NeoHelp).

This article presents the NeoHelp visual stimulus set created to facilitate investigation of need-of-help recognition with clinical and normative populations of different ages, including children. Need-of-help recognition is one aspect of socioemotional development and a necessary precondition for active helping. The NeoHelp consists of picture pairs showing everyday situations: The first item in a pair depicts a child needing help to achieve a goal; the second one shows the child achieving the goal. Pictures of birds in analogue situations are also included. These control stimuli enable implementation of a human-animal categorization task which serves to separate behavioral correlates specific to need-of-help recognition from general differentiation processes. It is a concern in experimental research to ensure that results do not relate to systematic perceptual differences when comparing responses to categories of different content. Therefore, we not only derived the NeoHelp-pictures within a pair from one another by altering as little as possible, but also assessed their perceptual similarity empirically. We show that NeoHelp-picture pairs are very similar regarding low-level perceptual properties across content categories. We obtained data from 60 children in a broad age range (4 to 13 years) for three different paradigms, in order to assess whether the intended categorization and differentiation could be observed reliably in a normative population. Our results demonstrate that children can differentiate the pictures' content regarding both need-of-help category as well as species as intended in spite of the high perceptual similarities. We provide standard response characteristics (hit rates and response times) that are useful for future selection of stimuli and comparison of results across studies. We show that task requirements coherently determine which aspects of the pictures influence response characteristics. Thus, we present NeoHelp, the first open-access standardized visual stimuli set for investigation of need-of-help recognition and invite researchers to use and extend it.