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Processing Fluency and Aesthetic Pleasure: Is Beauty in the Perceiver's Processing Experience?

Department of Psychosocial Science, University of Bergen, Norway

Norbert Schwarz

Department of Psychology and Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan

Piotr Winkielman

Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego

We propose that aesthetic pleasure is a funnction of the perceiver's processing dynamics: The more fluently perceivers can process an object, the more positive their aesthetic response. We review variables known to influence aesthetic judgments, such as figural goodness, figure-ground contrast, stimulus repetition, symmetry, and prototypicality, and trace their effects to changes in processing fluency. Other variables that influence processing fluency, like visual or semantic priming, similarly increase judgments of aesthetic pleasure. Our proposal provides an integrative framework for the study of aesthetic pleasure and sheds light on the interplay between early preferences versus cultural influences on taste, preferences for both prototypical and abstracted forms, and the relation between beauty and truth. In contrast to theories that trace aesthetic pleasure to objective stimulus features per se, we propose that beauty is grounded in the processing experiences of the perceiver, which are in part a function of stimulus properties.

Personality and Social Psychology Review, Vol. 8, No. 4, 364-382 (2004)
DOI: 10.1207/s15327957pspr0804_3


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