‹
Back
16:30 - 18:00
Parallel sessions 6
›
16:30 - 18:00
Room: HSZ - N9
Chair/s:
Thomas Jacobsen, Bettina Rolke
Our aesthetic experience of external stimuli is shaped by our cultural and individual backgrounds, as well as by various perceptual, cognitive and emotional processes. Empirical research has identified numerous factors that influence our aesthetic perception of stimuli, including their characteristics and the context in which stimuli are perceived. Recently, the question has also been raised about the impact of engaging with art on other areas of life. This symposium will present various approaches to empirical aesthetics research. In the first talk, Barbara Mühlbauer will ask whether two evaluation methods — rating and pairwise comparison — produce comparable aesthetic judgements and how stable these judgements remain over time. Claudia Muth's second talk will address how specific stimulus characteristics, such as the complexity of visual matrix patterns and ambivalence in artistic photographs, influence various components of aesthetic perception. She will also report results concerning the relationship between these characteristics and eye movements. In the third talk, Ronald Hübner will explore potential causes of individual preferences for different visual spiral patterns, attributing them to individual creative dispositions. In the fourth talk, Gemma Schino will explore the affective and cognitive changes that arise from engaging with meaningful artwork through interactive analysis and interaction with others. She will present a model that considers the interactive contribution of affect and cognitive strategies, drawing a connection to the general influence of emotional processes on cognition. In the final talk, Jan-Filip Tameling will present a cognitive network model mapping the concepts relevant to experiencing art. He will propose a visual art schema that could help identify the cognitive mechanisms involved in aesthetic experiences. Overall, the symposium provides a comprehensive insight into the multifaceted world of empirical aesthetics research, offering an overview of the various approaches, models, and perspectives employed.
Submission 228
How to Measure Beauty? Comparing Ratings and Pairwise Comparisons of Different Stimuli
SymposiumTalk-01
Presented by: Barbara Mühlbauer
Barbara Mühlbauer, Bettina Rolke
University of Tübingen, Germany
In most empirical aesthetic research, data on the aesthetic appeal of stimuli is obtained by asking participants to rate them on a Likert scale, requiring them to indicate, for example, their perceived beauty on a scale from 1 (not at all beautiful) to 7 (very beautiful). This rating method has many advantages, as it is easy to implement and allows multiple dimensions of an aesthetic impression to be evaluated simultaneously. However, it is uncertain whether data collected with a different method such as pairwise comparison yield similar results. Furthermore, it is unclear how stable individual aesthetic judgments are. Estimating the variance of aesthetic judgments is particularly important because rating studies typically only ask for one judgement.

We investigated these questions in two studies. In the first study, we compared judgments of the beauty of chair images, which were collected using either ratings or pair comparisons. To check the judgements' stability over time, each measurement was repeated ten times. The beauty assessments obtained using the two methods were very similar. These results demonstrate that both methods effectively capture aesthetic judgements. Furthermore, strong positive correlations were obtained between measurement repetitions within participants, suggesting that their opinion of beauty is stable and does not change substantially over time. In the second study, we used abstract artworks to test whether these results could be generalized to other stimuli. In summary, this systematic comparison of the two evaluation methods provides insights into their respective advantages and disadvantages, which will be discussed in the talk.