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Related Experiment Video

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Generating Strictly Controlled Stimuli for Figure Recognition Experiments
05:39

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Published on: March 18, 2019

Implicit affective evaluation of visual symmetry.

Alexis David James Makin1, Anna Pecchinenda, Marco Bertamini

  • 1Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, L69 7ZA, UK. alexis.makin@liverpool.ac.uk

Emotion (Washington, D.C.)
|January 19, 2012
PubMed
Summary

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) reveals an automatic preference for visual symmetry, suggesting that our positive response to beauty is deeply ingrained. This implicit bias, linked to perceptual fluency, influences aesthetic judgments.

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Visual Perception
  • Aesthetics

Background:

  • Aesthetic judgments often link beauty with symmetry.
  • The automaticity of this positive response to visual symmetry remains unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate whether the positive response to visual symmetry is automatic.
  • To measure the valence of visual regularities using implicit methods.

Main Methods:

  • Employed the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to assess automatic affective responses to visual patterns.
  • Participants classified dot patterns (random, reflectional, rotational, translational) and word valence (positive, negative).
  • Response times were analyzed to infer implicit preferences.

Main Results:

  • Faster response times were observed when reflectional patterns were paired with positive words, indicating an implicit preference.
  • Implicit preferences for reflectional patterns over rotational/translational, and rotational over random, were detected.
  • Implicit preferences correlated with pattern identification speed, suggesting perceptual fluency as a driver.

Conclusions:

  • The Implicit Association Test (IAT) can uncover automatic affective responses to visual stimuli.
  • Perceptual fluency, the ease of processing visual information, contributes to implicit aesthetic preferences for symmetry.
  • Findings suggest an automatic, rather than solely conscious, basis for the link between symmetry and perceived beauty.