Aesthetic liking in automatic processing: Distinct effects of perceptual and conceptual fluency

In everyday life, aesthetic liking largely depends on the fluency of stimulus-driven, default, rapid, and automatic processing. However, our understanding of how perceptual and conceptual fluency jointly shape aesthetic liking in automatic processing remains limited. In two experiments, the masked priming paradigm was employed to manipulate perceptual and conceptual fluency of target stimuli separately, and participants were instructed to rate liking for colored images of everyday objects based on their initial impressions. The results indicated that the masked matched contours and words significantly reduced response times for liking judgments of the target images and increased liking ratings, whereas mismatched contours and words had no significant effect. Both experiments additionally varied the target duration to investigate whether the effects of perceptual and conceptual priming were influenced by another manipulation of perceptual fluency. We found that the perceptual priming effect diminished with longer target duration, while the conceptual priming effect remained consistent. These findings provide direct evidence that both perceptual and conceptual fluency can enhance aesthetic liking in automatic processing, and their effects are dissociated and not interchangeable.