Dynamics of Aesthetic Appreciation for Artificial Categories

Everyday life in westernised countries is characterised by ongoing changes in the environment, for instance, through the introduction of new, innovative designs. Innovative or untypical designs often disrupt the visual habits leading to the rejection of these designs at first sight. However, since humans adapt to new experiences, e.g. through intensive elaboration of such products, the perception and thus the aesthetic appreciation (AA) inherits a dynamic quality leading to changes of AA. In six projects I demonstrated this dynamic quality of AA, which was implemented as a construct of different variables (e.g. attractiveness, arousal, interestingness, valence, boredom and innovativeness). Dynamic changes of AA were investigated using two main paradigms: the Repeated Evaluation Technique (RET), which emphasises deep elaboration of the stimulus material, and adaptation paradigms massively exposing participants to innovative or untypical exemplars. Results of all projects supported the hypothesis that new experiences trigger dynamics in AA. These dynamics were moderated by primed semantic concepts, the implemented stimulus set and situational effects. Results of the projects using adaptation paradigms supported the hypothesis that adaptation leads to the recalibration of the norm of a category being in line with the norm-based model. In this context, two important moderators were identified - namely the distance as well as the similarity of the adaptors to the tested stimuli. These results illustrated the ongoing adaptive changes of AA due to new experiences and underline the adaptive nature of perception and the representation of objects.Das Alltagsleben in "westlichen" Ländern ist durch die fortwährenden Veränderungen der Umwelt gekennzeichnet – z. B. durch die Markteinführung neuer, innovativer Produktdesigns. Innovative oder untypische Designs durchbrechen oft die Sehgewohnheiten. Dieser Umstand führt anfänglich häufig zu einer Zurückweisung dieser Designs. Da Menschen jedoch auf neue Erfahrungen adaptieren, z.B. durch die intensive Beschäftigung mit solchen Produkten, haben die Wahrnehmung und damit auch die ästhetische Beurteilung (AEB) eine dynamische Qualität, welche zu Änderungen der AEB führt. In sechs Projekten wurde diese dynamische Qualität der AEB demonstriert, welche als Konstrukt der Variablen Attraktivität, Anregung, Interessantheit, Valenz, Langeweile und Innovativität implementiert wurde. Die Dynamiken der AEB wurden durch zwei Hauptparadigma untersucht: die Repeated Evaluation Technique (RET), welche eine tiefe Elaboration des Stimulusmaterials forciert, und das Adaptationsparadigma, welches die VersuchsteilnehmerInnen massiv innovativen oder untypischen Exemplaren aussetzt. Die Resultate aller sechs Projekte unterstützen die Hypothese, dass neue Erfahrungen Dynamiken der AEB auslösen. Diese Dynamiken werden durch das Priming semantischer Konzepte, das implementierte Stimulus-Set und situationsspezifische Effekte moderiert. Die Resultate der Projekte mit Adaptationsparadigmen unterstützen die Hypothese, dass Adaptation zu der Rekalibrierung der Norm einer Kategorie führt, wie es von dem Norm-Based-Model vorhergesagt wird. In diesem Zusammenhang wurden zwei Moderatorvariablen identifiziert: die Distanz und die Ähnlichkeit der Adaptoren zu dem getesteten Stimuli. Die Resultate demonstrieren die fortwährenden adaptiven Änderungen der AEB aufgrund von neuen Erfahrungen und unterstreichen die adaptive Natur der Wahrnehmung und der Repräsentation von Objekten

African perceptions of female attractiveness

Little is known about mate choice preferences outside Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic societies, even though these Western populations may be particularly unrepresentative of human populations. To our knowledge, this is the first study to test which facial cues contribute to African perceptions of African female attractiveness and also the first study to test the combined role of facial adiposity, skin colour (lightness, yellowness and redness), skin homogeneity and youthfulness in the facial attractiveness preferences of any population. Results show that youthfulness, skin colour, skin homogeneity and facial adiposity significantly and independently predict attractiveness in female African faces. Younger, thinner women with a lighter, yellower skin colour and a more homogenous skin tone are considered more attractive. These findings provide a more global perspective on human mate choice and point to a universal role for these four facial cues in female facial attractiveness.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Visibility in Information Spaces and in Geographic Environments. Post-Proceedings of the KI'11 Workshop (October 4th, 2011, TU Berlin, Germany)

In the post-proceedings of the Workshop "Visibility in Information Spaces and in Geographic Environments" a selection of research papers is presented where the topic of visibility is addressed in different contexts. Visibility governs information selection in geographic environments as well as in information spaces and in cognition. The users of social media navigate in information spaces and at the same time, as embodied agents, they move in geographic environments. Both activities follow a similar type of information economy in which decisions by individuals or groups require a highly selective filtering to avoid information overload. In this context, visibility refers to the fact that in social processes some actors, topics or places are more salient than others. Formal notions of visibility include the centrality measures from social network analysis or the plethora of web page ranking methods. Recently, comparable approaches have been proposed to analyse activities in geographic environments: Place Rank, for instance, describes the social visibility of urban places based on the temporal sequence of tourist visit patterns. The workshop aimed to bring together researchers from AI, Geographic Information Science, Cognitive Science, and other disciplines who are interested in understanding how the different forms of visibility in information spaces and geographic environments relate to one another and how the results from basic research can be used to improve spatial search engines, geo-recommender systems or location-based social networks

The power of liking: Highly sensitive asthetic processing for guiding us through the world

Assessing liking is one of the most intriguing and influencing types of processing we experience day by day. We can decide almost instantaneously what we like and are highly consistent in our assessments, even across cultures. Still, the underlying mechanism is not well understood and often neglected by vision scientists. Several potential predictors for liking are discussed in the literature, among them very prominently typicality. Here, we analysed the impact of subtle changes of two perceptual dimensions (shape and colour saturation) of three-dimensional models of chairs on typicality and liking. To increase the validity of testing, we utilized a test-adaptation–retest design for extracting sensitivity data of both variables from a static (test only) as well as from a dynamic perspective (test–retest). We showed that typicality was only influenced by shape properties, whereas liking combined processing of shape plus saturation properties, indicating more complex and integrative processing. Processing the aesthetic value of objects, persons, or scenes is an essential and sophisticated mechanism, which seems to be highly sensitive to the slightest variations of perceptual input

Jump on the innovator's train: cognitive principles for creating appreciation in innovative product designs

In everyday life, we find shared preferences for idiosyncratic product features paradigmatically displayed by bestselling gadgets like Apples iPhone’s touch screen, which after gaining acceptance and appreciation are susceptible to being copied by competitors. Psychological research on the phenomenon of shared preferences for innovative design features and the probable benefit of copying them is still lacking. We tested gains of acceptance for imitators through an adaptation paradigm where typicality and liking of potentially innovative features were analysed dynamically. We found significant changes in typicality and liking for imitators being highly similar to the original. These adaptation processes in combination with transfer effects create the specific opportunity for imitators to jump on the innovator’s train by providing similar innovative features and thereby participating in the initial innovator’s success. Importantly, they participate best not by solely copying a specific novel feature, but by additionally generally looking very similar to the innovator

Innovation is Appreciated When We Feel Safe: On the Situational Dependence of the Appreciation of Innovation

Appreciation of innovative goods requires the fulfilment of several pre-conditions, e.g., before we can admire an innovative design we must have cognitively elaborated it. In the present study, we focused on situational context as one factor affecting appreciation of innovations. In order to demonstrate that evaluation of innovation for the appreciation of consumer products is sensitive to situational demands we studied the selective activation of fascinating facets versus threatening or even dangerous aspects of innovation. We varied the specific direction of elaboration towards potentially fascinating or dangerous aspects of car designs that differed in their degree of innovativeness. Participants showed specific appreciation for highly innovative designs only if they had elaborated the material on the basis of scales associated with the more fascinating aspects of their stimuli. A repetition after a week revealed that participants recalibrate to the appreciative norms with which they started, but that they showed the same dissociate pattern of results after having elaborated the material again. The findings underline the adaptive function of aesthetically-based evaluations strongly depending on the situational context in which they are evaluated