Self-reference and emotional reaction drive aesthetic judgment

Traditional philosophical inquiry, and more recently neuroscientific studies, have investigated the sources of artworks' aesthetic appeal. A substantial effort has been made to isolate the objective features contributing to aesthetic appreciation. While variables such as contrast or symmetry have been shown to robustly impact aesthetic judgment, they only account for a small portion of the intersubjective variability in aesthetic ratings. Recent multiprocess model of aesthetic appreciation could accommodate this finding by proposing that evaluative processes based on self-reference underpin the idiosyncrasy of aesthetic judgment. We tested this hypothesis in two behavioral studies, that were basically conceptual replications of our previous work, in which we took advantage of the self-reference effect on memory. We also tried to disentangle the role of self-reference and emotional reaction to artworks in guiding aesthetic judgments, by comparing an aesthetic judgment encoding condition to a self-reference condition (Study 1), and an emotional evaluation condition (Study 2). We show that artworks encoded in an aesthetic judgment condition exhibit a similar mnesic advantage compared to both the self-reference and the emotional evaluation encoding conditions. Moreover, retrospective emotional judgment correlates with both self-reference and aesthetic judgments ratings. These results suggest that a basic mechanism, appraisal of self-relevance, could ground aesthetic judgments

Movie editing influences spectators' time perception

Filmmakers use different techniques (e.g., camera movements, editing) to shape viewers' experience. In particular, editing can be used to handle the temporal unfolding of events represented in a movie. Nevertheless, little is known about how different editing types impact viewers' time perception. In an exploratory on-line study (90 participants) and a pre-registered conceptual replication study (60 participants), we asked participants to judge (Study 1) or reproduce (Study 2) the duration of 45 excerpts of the movie "Le Ballon Rouge" containing either continuous editing, action discontinuity editing or no editing. Each excerpt was formatted in three durations (2000, 2500 or 3000 ms). In both studies, we reported that scenes containing continuous editing were perceived as longer than the other two scene types. Moreover, scenes containing action discontinuity editing were perceived as longer than scenes with no editing. This study contributes to the emerging field of psycho-cinematics which could ultimately develop the dialog between arts and science

Movie editing influences spectators’ time perception

Filmmakers use different techniques (e.g., camera movements, editing) to shape viewers' experience. In particular, editing can be used to handle the temporal unfolding of events represented in a movie. Nevertheless, little is known about how different editing types impact viewers’ time perception. In an exploratory on-line study (90 participants) and a pre-registered conceptual replication study (60 participants), we asked participants to judge (Study 1) or reproduce (Study 2) the duration of 45 excerpts of the movie “Le Ballon Rouge” containing either continuous editing, action discontinuity editing or no editing. Each excerpt was formatted in three durations (2000, 2500 or 3000 ms). In both studies, we reported that scenes containing continuous editing were perceived as longer than the other two scene types. Moreover, scenes containing action discontinuity editing were perceived as longer than scenes with no editing. This study contributes to the emerging field of psycho-cinematics which could ultimately develop the dialog between arts and science

In Search of Sublime Music

International audienceSince Burke and Kant, even subjectivist approaches to the experience of the sublime have claimed that some objects afford it more than others. In 2021, nearly all the participants in the ANR SublimAE questionnaire gave precise answers when asked to identify a piece of music that elicited in them an experience of the sublime. We analyzed this collection of 128 tracks through Music Information Retrieval (MIR) techniques, in order to determine what sonic traits, if any, distinguished these pieces of "sublime music" from those of a second collection, designated by a control group of respondents who answered a question about an experience of the beautiful.The results did not identify a set of recurrent traits in these putatively sublime pieces, except for minor differences of timbre, like a brighter quality of the spectra. Rather, our study suggests that the topical opposition between sublime and beautiful objects is less adequate to understanding the listening experience, than a dynamic and continuous view of both the objective and the subjective aspects of these aesthetical categories.</div

In Search of Sublime Music

International audienceSince Burke and Kant, even subjectivist approaches to the experience of the sublime have claimed that some objects afford it more than others. In 2021, nearly all the participants in the ANR SublimAE questionnaire gave precise answers when asked to identify a piece of music that elicited in them an experience of the sublime. We analyzed this collection of 128 tracks through Music Information Retrieval (MIR) techniques, in order to determine what sonic traits, if any, distinguished these pieces of "sublime music" from those of a second collection, designated by a control group of respondents who answered a question about an experience of the beautiful.The results did not identify a set of recurrent traits in these putatively sublime pieces, except for minor differences of timbre, like a brighter quality of the spectra. Rather, our study suggests that the topical opposition between sublime and beautiful objects is less adequate to understanding the listening experience, than a dynamic and continuous view of both the objective and the subjective aspects of these aesthetical categories.</div