Framing wellbeing and societal challenge mechanisms via distinct outcomes of art experience? A brief revisit to the VIMAP.

In this brief contribution-happily afforded by the 20th anniversary of Physics of Life Reviews-we take the opportunity to reflect on our earlier published paper, which had introduced a theoretical framework, the VIMAP (Vienna Integrated Model of (Top-Down and Bottom-up processes in) Art Perception; (Pelowski et al., [1])) that has come to represent a major basis for organizing, anticipating, and empirically investigating the nuanced, multivariate visual art experience. We look back at the original model and its hypotheses, especially as these regard distinct "outcomes," which we had argued may provide a superstructure of supraordinate, shared varieties of art experience detected across individual meetings of viewer, context, and artworks.

Exploring the influence of urban art interventions on attraction and wellbeing: an empirical field experiment.

While cities are attractive places, brimming with opportunities and possibilities for their inhabitants, they have also been found to have negative consequences, especially on physical and mental health. In a world of ever-growing urban populations, it is important to understand how to make cities healthier and more pleasant places to live. In the present study, we investigated the impact of art as an urban intervention and compared it to the well-known effects of greenery (i.

Using machine learning to predict judgments on Western visual art along content-representational and formal-perceptual attributes.

Art research has long aimed to unravel the complex associations between specific attributes, such as color, complexity, and emotional expressiveness, and art judgments, including beauty, creativity, and liking. However, the fundamental distinction between attributes as inherent characteristics or features of the artwork and judgments as subjective evaluations remains an exciting topic. This paper reviews the literature of the last half century, to identify key attributes, and employs machine learning, specifically Gradient Boosted Decision Trees (GBDT), to predict 13 art judgments along 17 attributes.

Cross-cultural comparison of beauty judgments in visual art using machine learning analysis of art attribute predictors among Japanese and German speakers.

In empirical art research, understanding how viewers judge visual artworks as beautiful is often explored through the study of attributes-specific inherent characteristics or artwork features such as color, complexity, and emotional expressiveness. These attributes form the basis for subjective evaluations, including the judgment of beauty. Building on this conceptual framework, our study examines the beauty judgments of 54 Western artworks made by native Japanese and German speakers, utilizing an extreme randomized trees model-a data-driven machine learning approach-to investigate cross-cultural differences in evaluation behavior.

Experiencing beauty in everyday life.

Beauty surrounds us in many ways every day. In three experience sampling (ESM) studies we investigated frequency, category of eliciting stimuli (natural vs human-made) and, the potential moderating role of several individual difference measures on such everyday experiences of beauty in an ecologically valid manner. Further, we explored the impact of such experiences on valence & arousal.

The dynamics of experiencing Gestalt and Aha in cubist art: pupil responses and art evaluations show a complex interplay of task, stimuli content, and time course.

Introduction: Gestalt perception refers to the cognitive ability to perceive various elements as a unified whole. In our study, we delve deeper into the phenomenon of Gestalt recognition in visual cubist art, a transformative process culminating in what is often described as an Aha moment. This Aha moment signifies a sudden understanding of what is seen, merging seemingly disparate elements into a coherent meaningful picture.

Metaphors or mechanism? Predictive coding and a (brief) history of empirical study of the arts.

Predictive processing (PP) offers an intriguing approach to perception, cognition, but also to appreciation of the arts. It does this by positing both a theoretical basis-one might say a 'metaphor'-for how we engage and respond, placing emphasis on mismatches rather than fluent overlap between schema and environment. Even more, it holds the promise for translating metaphor into neurobiological bases, suggesting a means for considering mechanisms-from basic perceptions to possibly even our complex, aesthetic experiences.

Aesthetics and predictive processing: grounds and prospects of a fruitful encounter.

In the last few years, a remarkable convergence of interests and results has emerged between scholars interested in the arts and aesthetics from a variety of perspectives and cognitive scientists studying the mind and brain within the predictive processing (PP) framework. This convergence has so far proven fruitful for both sides: while PP is increasingly adopted as a framework for understanding aesthetic phenomena, the arts and aesthetics, examined under the lens of PP, are starting to be seen as important windows into our mental functioning. The result is a vast and fast-growing research programme that promises to deliver important insights into our aesthetic encounters as well as a wide range of psychological phenomena of general interest.

Vienna Talking Faces (ViTaFa): A multimodal person database with synchronized videos, images, and voices.

Social perception relies on different sensory channels, including vision and audition, which are specifically important for judgements of appearance. Therefore, to understand multimodal integration in person perception, it is important to study both face and voice in a synchronized form. We introduce the Vienna Talking Faces (ViTaFa) database, a high-quality audiovisual database focused on multimodal research of social perception.

Reading in the city: mobile eye-tracking and evaluation of text in an everyday setting.

Reading is often regarded as a mundane aspect of everyday life. However, little is known about the natural reading experiences in daily activities. To fill this gap, this study presents two field studies ( = 39 and 26, respectively), where we describe how people explore visual environments and divide their attention toward text elements in highly ecological settings, i.

Let's put a smile on that face-A positive facial expression improves aesthetics of portrait photographs.

In today's age of social media and smartphones, portraits-such as selfies or pictures of friends and family-are very frequently produced, shared and viewed images. Despite their prevalence, the psychological factors that characterize a 'good' photo-one that people will generally like, keep, and think is especially aesthetically pleasing-are not well understood. Here, we studied how a subtle change in facial expression (smiling) in portraits determines their aesthetic image value (beyond a more positive appearance of the depicted person).

Machine learning revealed symbolism, emotionality, and imaginativeness as primary predictors of creativity evaluations of western art paintings.

Creativity is a compelling yet elusive phenomenon, especially when manifested in visual art, where its evaluation is often a subjective and complex process. Understanding how individuals judge creativity in visual art is a particularly intriguing question. Conventional linear approaches often fail to capture the intricate nature of human behavior underlying such judgments.

Art and Perception: Using Empirical Aesthetics in Research on Consciousness.

Understanding consciousness is a major frontier in the natural sciences. However, given the nuanced and ambiguous sets of conditions regarding how and when consciousness appears to manifest, it is also one of the most elusive topics for investigation. In this context, we argue that research in empirical aesthetics-specifically on the experience of art-holds strong potential for this research area.

Aesthetic Preference for Negatively-Valenced Artworks Remains Stable in Pathological Aging: A Comparison Between Cognitively Impaired Patients With Alzheimer's Disease and Healthy Controls.

Background: Despite severe cognitive dysfunction in Alzheimer's disease (AD), aesthetic preferences in AD patients seem to retain some stability over time, similarly to healthy controls. However, the underlying mechanisms of aesthetic preference stability in AD remain unclear. We therefore aimed to study the role of emotional valence of stimuli for stability of aesthetic preferences in patients with AD compared to cognitively unimpaired elderly adults.

Gaze patterns reveal aesthetic distance while viewing art.

For centuries, Western philosophers have argued that aesthetic experiences differ from common, everyday pleasing sensations, and further, that mental states, such as disinterested contemplation and aesthetic distance, underlie these complex experiences. We empirically tested whether basic perceptual processes of information intake reveal evidence for aesthetic distance, specifically toward visual art. We conducted two eye tracking experiments using appropriately matched visual stimuli (environmental scenes and representational paintings) with 59 participants using two different presentation durations (25 and 6 s).

Social reputation influences on liking and willingness-to-pay for artworks: A multimethod design investigating choice behavior along with physiological measures and motivational factors.

Art, as a prestigious cultural commodity, concerns aesthetic and monetary values, personal tastes, and social reputation in various social contexts-all of which are reflected in choices concerning our liking, or in other contexts, our actual willingness-to-pay for artworks. But, how do these different aspects interact in regard to the concept of social reputation and our private versus social selves, which appear to be essentially intervening, and potentially conflicting, factors driving choice? In our study, we investigated liking and willingness-to-pay choices using-in art research-a novel, forced-choice paradigm. Participants (N = 123) made choices from artwork-triplets presented with opposing artistic quality and monetary value-labeling, thereby creating ambiguous choice situations.

Does art reduce pain and stress? A registered report protocol of investigating autonomic and endocrine markers of music, visual art, and multimodal aesthetic experience.

The pain- and stress-reducing effects of music are well-known, but the effects of visual art, and the combination of these two, are much less investigated. We aim to (1) investigate the pain- and (2) stress-reducing effects of multimodal (music + visual art) aesthetic experience as we expect this to have stronger effects than a single modal aesthetic experience (music/ visual art), and in an exploratory manner, (3) investigate the underlying mechanisms of aesthetic experience, and the (4) individual differences. In a repeated-measures design (music, visual art, multimodal aesthetic experience, control) participants bring self-selected "movingly beautiful" visual artworks and pieces of music to the lab, where pain and stress are induced by the cold pressor test.

Swipes and Saves: A Taxonomy of Factors Influencing Aesthetic Assessments and Perceived Beauty of Mobile Phone Photographs.

Digital images taken by mobile phones are the most frequent class of images created today. Due to their omnipresence and the many ways they are encountered, they require a specific focus in research. However, to date, there is no systematic compilation of the various factors that may determine our evaluations of such images, and thus no explanation of how users select and identify relatively "better" or "worse" photos.

Testing the facsimile accommodation hypothesis.

Research has failed to find evidence for a genuineness effect: the idea that aesthetic experiences are better when looking at real artworks versus reproductions of those artworks. One common explanation for this lack of an effect is the facsimile accommodation hypothesis. This hypothesis states that people can "look past" the limitations of a reproduction, which obscures the effect.

Differences in regional gray matter volume predict the extent to which openness influences judgments of beauty and pleasantness of interior architectural spaces.

Hedonic evaluation of sensory objects varies from person to person. While this variability has been linked to differences in experience, little is known about why stimuli lead to different evaluations in different people. We used linear mixed-effects models to determine the extent to which the openness, contour, and ceiling height of interior spaces influenced the beauty and pleasantness ratings of 18 participants.

The Display Makes a Difference: A Mobile Eye Tracking Study on the Perception of Art Before and After a Museum's Rearrangement.

There is increasing awareness that the perception of art is affected by the way it is presented. In 2018, the Austrian Gallery Belvedere redisplayed its permanent collection. Our multidisciplinary team seized this opportunity to investigate the viewing behavior of specific artworks both before and after the museum's rearrangement.