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Aesthetic appeal influences visual search performance.

Irene Reppa1, Siné McDougall2

  • 1School of Psychology, Swansea University, Swansea, SA2 8PP, UK. i.reppa@swansea.ac.uk.

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Aesthetic appeal influences visual search. Appealing targets speed up response times, while appealing distractors slow them down, impacting search efficiency.

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Visual Perception
  • Human-Computer Interaction

Background:

  • Aesthetic appeal of visual stimuli can affect performance in time-critical tasks.
  • The role of aesthetic appeal in guiding visual search remains underexplored.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate if aesthetic appeal functions as an object attribute guiding visual search.
  • To determine the impact of target and distractor aesthetic appeal on visual search efficiency.

Main Methods:

  • Three experiments (N=112) utilized a classic visual search task.
  • Participants completed 320 trials each, with icons varying in aesthetic appeal and complexity/concreteness.
  • Search performance was measured by response time (RT) and efficiency with varying numbers of distractors.

Main Results:

  • Target aesthetic appeal did not significantly influence search efficiency but consistently reduced response time (RT).
  • Appealing distractors, compared to neutral ones, significantly slowed down search RT.
  • These effects were observed across different levels of visual complexity and concreteness.

Conclusions:

  • Aesthetic appeal acts as a salient object attribute influencing visual search.
  • Appealing targets facilitate faster search, while appealing distractors impede search efficiency.
  • This research provides novel insights into the interplay between aesthetics and visual attention.