Individual Differences in Complexity Preference and Artistic Style: Neoclassical versus Expressionistic Aesthetics

1998 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy King ◽  
Jith Meganathan ◽  
Jill Nagahara ◽  
Marilia Boscolo
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Visual Information ◽  
Therapy Group ◽  
Visual Complexity ◽  
Hemispheric Lateralization ◽  
Cortical Arousal ◽  
Artistic Style ◽  
Expressive Therapy ◽  
Complexity Preference ◽  
Aesthetic Preferences

Individual differences in style and emotional content of artwork created in an expressive therapy group were correlated with individual aesthetic preferences for visual complexity in order to investigate the dichotomy between classical and expressionistic/romantic aesthetic models. Twenty-two subjects produced artwork rated according to Simon's theory of styles. A dimension varying from vivid, nonrealistic, and painterly art to muted, realistic, and linear art was found to be moderately stable across sessions and reliable across raters. This dimension further correlated with subjects' scores on the Barron-Welsh Art Scale, assessing their preference for visual complexity, as well as with ratings of anxious and angry content in their art. These results were interpreted in light of recent models of hemispheric lateralization in complex emotional/visual information processing, in particular, in terms of individual biases in right vs. left cortical arousal.

Poetic Vividness and Aesthetic Preference: Individual Differences in Poetry Writing Styles

1998 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 428-430
Author(s):  
Mary Gende ◽  
Roy King
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Therapy Group ◽  
Visual Complexity ◽  
Poetry Therapy ◽  
Aesthetic Preference ◽  
Poetry Writing ◽  
Style Of Writing

Preference for visual complexity is shown to be correlated with an imagistic and metaphoric style of writing poetry for individuals participating in a poetry therapy group.

scholarly journals Training-induced plasticity enables visualizing sounds with a visual-to-auditory conversion device

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacques Pesnot Lerousseau ◽  
Gabriel Arnold ◽  
Malika Auvray
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Visual Information ◽  
Sensory Modality ◽  
Sensory Substitution ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
Visual Functions ◽  
Tactile Stimuli ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Visual Distractors ◽  
Auditory Processes

AbstractSensory substitution devices aim at restoring visual functions by converting visual information into auditory or tactile stimuli. Although these devices show promise in the range of behavioral abilities they allow, the processes underlying their use remain underspecified. In particular, while an initial debate focused on the visual versus auditory or tactile nature of sensory substitution, since over a decade, the idea that it reflects a mixture of both has emerged. In order to investigate behaviorally the extent to which visual and auditory processes are involved, participants completed a Stroop-like crossmodal interference paradigm before and after being trained with a conversion device which translates visual images into sounds. In addition, participants' auditory abilities and their phenomenologies were measured. Our study revealed that, after training, when asked to identify sounds, processes shared with vision were involved, as participants’ performance in sound identification was influenced by the simultaneously presented visual distractors. In addition, participants’ performance during training and their associated phenomenology depended on their auditory abilities, revealing that processing finds its roots in the input sensory modality. Our results pave the way for improving the design and learning of these devices by taking into account inter-individual differences in auditory and visual perceptual strategies.

scholarly journals Do Valenced Odors and Trait Body Odor Disgust Affect Evaluation of Emotion in Dynamic Faces?

Perception ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (12) ◽  
pp. 1412-1426 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elmeri Syrjänen ◽  
Marco Tullio Liuzza ◽  
Håkan Fischer ◽  
Jonas K. Olofsson
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Visual Information ◽  
Relevant Information ◽  
Body Odor ◽  
Disgust Sensitivity ◽  
Facial Perception ◽  
Related Information ◽  
Dynamic Faces ◽  
Unpleasant Odor

Disgust is a core emotion evolved to detect and avoid the ingestion of poisonous food as well as the contact with pathogens and other harmful agents. Previous research has shown that multisensory presentation of olfactory and visual information may strengthen the processing of disgust-relevant information. However, it is not known whether these findings extend to dynamic facial stimuli that changes from neutral to emotionally expressive, or if individual differences in trait body odor disgust may influence the processing of disgust-related information. In this preregistered study, we tested whether a classification of dynamic facial expressions as happy or disgusted, and an emotional evaluation of these facial expressions, would be affected by individual differences in body odor disgust sensitivity, and by exposure to a sweat-like, negatively valenced odor (valeric acid), as compared with a soap-like, positively valenced odor (lilac essence) or a no-odor control. Using Bayesian hypothesis testing, we found evidence that odors do not affect recognition of emotion in dynamic faces even when body odor disgust sensitivity was used as moderator. However, an exploratory analysis suggested that an unpleasant odor context may cause faster RTs for faces, independent of their emotional expression. Our results further our understanding of the scope and limits of odor effects on facial perception affect and suggest further studies should focus on reproducibility, specifying experimental circumstances where odor effects on facial expressions may be present versus absent.

Greater Visual Working Memory Capacity for Visually Matched Stimuli When They Are Perceived as Meaningful

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (5) ◽  
pp. 902-918 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabel E. Asp ◽  
Viola S. Störmer ◽  
Timothy F. Brady
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Visual Working Memory ◽  
Visual Information ◽  
Memory Performance ◽  
Working Memory Capacity ◽  
Visual Complexity ◽  
Memory Capacity ◽  
Subjective Perception ◽  
Neural Delay ◽  
Meaningful Stimuli

Abstract Almost all models of visual working memory—the cognitive system that holds visual information in an active state—assume it has a fixed capacity: Some models propose a limit of three to four objects, where others propose there is a fixed pool of resources for each basic visual feature. Recent findings, however, suggest that memory performance is improved for real-world objects. What supports these increases in capacity? Here, we test whether the meaningfulness of a stimulus alone influences working memory capacity while controlling for visual complexity and directly assessing the active component of working memory using EEG. Participants remembered ambiguous stimuli that could either be perceived as a face or as meaningless shapes. Participants had higher performance and increased neural delay activity when the memory display consisted of more meaningful stimuli. Critically, by asking participants whether they perceived the stimuli as a face or not, we also show that these increases in visual working memory capacity and recruitment of additional neural resources are because of the subjective perception of the stimulus and thus cannot be driven by physical properties of the stimulus. Broadly, this suggests that the capacity for active storage in visual working memory is not fixed but that more meaningful stimuli recruit additional working memory resources, allowing them to be better remembered.

scholarly journals Gray Matter Volume in Different Cortical Structures Dissociably Relates to Individual Differences in Capacity and Precision of Visual Working Memory

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (9) ◽  
pp. 4759-4770
Author(s):  
Maro G Machizawa ◽  
Jon Driver ◽  
Takeo Watanabe
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Individual Differences ◽  
Visual Working Memory ◽  
Gray Matter ◽  
Visual Information ◽  
Parietal Lobe ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Gray Matter Volume ◽  
Brain Anatomy

Abstract Visual working memory (VWM) refers to our ability to selectively maintain visual information in a mental representation. While cognitive limits of VWM greatly influence a variety of mental operations, it remains controversial whether the quantity or quality of representations in mind constrains VWM. Here, we examined behavior-to-brain anatomical relations as well as brain activity to brain anatomy associations with a “neural” marker specific to the retention interval of VWM. Our results consistently indicated that individuals who maintained a larger number of items in VWM tended to have a larger gray matter (GM) volume in their left lateral occipital region. In contrast, individuals with a superior ability to retain with high precision tended to have a larger GM volume in their right parietal lobe. These results indicate that individual differences in quantity and quality of VWM may be associated with regional GM volumes in a dissociable manner, indicating willful integration of information in VWM may recruit separable cortical subsystems.

scholarly journals The understanding of the text and images by teenagers with different levels of intelligence with eye tracking using

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 02006
Author(s):  
Oksana V. Zashchirinskaia ◽  
Elena Nikolaeva
Keyword(s):  
Mental Retardation ◽  
Visual Information ◽  
Visual Complexity ◽  
Event Analysis ◽  
Mild Mental Retardation ◽  
Emotional Aspect ◽  
Specific Disorders ◽  
The Comparative Study ◽  
High Degree ◽  
Different Levels

The aim of this study was to identify and compare the characteristics of the recognition and understanding of verbal and nonverbal stimuli in the form of a text and drawing images of various degrees of definition applicable to students with mild mental retardation. The objects of the comparative study were graduates of schools with a varying degree of the intelligence decline (F83 – mixed specific disorders of psychological development and F70 – mild mental retardation). 85 subjects were participants. There were 49% boys and 51% girls. The study revealed specific features of perception and understanding of the texts and images of different degree of visual complexity by students with mild mental retardation. In the analysis of the visual information, they preferred to focus on the emotional aspect of the content both of the texts and pictures. Students with mild mental retardation demonstrated a lower level of cognitive development and volitional activity when viewing a stimulus of a high degree of visual complexity. A specific feature in the perception and understanding of the texts and images by these students is the lack of cognitive orientation on the procedural side event analysis.

scholarly journals Working memory content is distorted by its use in perceptual comparisons

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keisuke Fukuda ◽  
April Emily Pereira ◽  
Joseph M. Saito ◽  
Ty Yi Tang ◽  
Hiroyuki Tsubomi ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Individual Differences ◽  
Computational Modeling ◽  
Visual Information ◽  
Dynamic Environment ◽  
Memory Bias ◽  
General Mechanism ◽  
Memory Representation ◽  
Memory Representations ◽  
Memory Content

Visual information around us is rarely static. To carry out a task in such a dynamic environment, we often have to compare current visual input with our working memory representation of the immediate past. However, little is known about what happens to a working memory (WM) representation when it is compared with perceptual input. Here, we tested university students and found that perceptual comparisons retroactively bias working memory representations toward subjectively-similar perceptual inputs. Furthermore, using computational modeling and individual differences analyses, we found that representational integration between WM representations and perceptually-similar input underlies this similarity-induced memory bias. Together, our findings highlight a novel source of WM distortion and suggest a general mechanism that determines how WM representations interact with new perceptual input.

scholarly journals Early Electrophysiological Markers of Navigational Affordances in Scenes

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Assaf Harel ◽  
Jeffery D. Nador ◽  
Michael F. Bonner ◽  
Russell A. Epstein
Keyword(s):  
Visual Information ◽  
Scene Perception ◽  
Spatial Navigation ◽  
Time Windows ◽  
Visual Complexity ◽  
Local Environment ◽  
Relevant Information ◽  
Perceptual Processing ◽  
Research Reporting ◽  
Cortical Areas

Abstract Scene perception and spatial navigation are interdependent cognitive functions, and there is increasing evidence that cortical areas that process perceptual scene properties also carry information about the potential for navigation in the environment (navigational affordances). However, the temporal stages by which visual information is transformed into navigationally relevant information are not yet known. We hypothesized that navigational affordances are encoded during perceptual processing and therefore should modulate early visually evoked ERPs, especially the scene-selective P2 component. To test this idea, we recorded ERPs from participants while they passively viewed computer-generated room scenes matched in visual complexity. By simply changing the number of doors (no doors, 1 door, 2 doors, 3 doors), we were able to systematically vary the number of pathways that afford movement in the local environment, while keeping the overall size and shape of the environment constant. We found that rooms with no doors evoked a higher P2 response than rooms with three doors, consistent with prior research reporting higher P2 amplitude to closed relative to open scenes. Moreover, we found P2 amplitude scaled linearly with the number of doors in the scenes. Navigability effects on the ERP waveform were also observed in a multivariate analysis, which showed significant decoding of the number of doors and their location at earlier time windows. Together, our results suggest that navigational affordances are represented in the early stages of scene perception. This complements research showing that the occipital place area automatically encodes the structure of navigable space and strengthens the link between scene perception and navigation.

Scientific and Design Understandings of Aesthetics

2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 380-384
Author(s):  
Dahlia Alharoon ◽  
Douglas J. Gillan ◽  
Carina Lei
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
User Experience ◽  
Scientific Research ◽  
Present Review ◽  
Research Opportunities ◽  
Aesthetic Responses ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Aesthetic Preferences

User Experience (UX) extends the construct of usability by an additional focus on emotion, motivation and aesthetics. An emphasis on aesthetics has been undertaken to a greater extent by design disciplines than by science. The present review examines both design and scientific approaches to aesthetics in order to integrate the two approaches and identify research opportunities that could result in science based design principals. The review of design approaches to aesthetics indicates the primary importance of balance as an element of design. Accordingly, research on the role of balance in producing aesthetic responses from users is a reasonable starting point for a program of research. Additionally, the analysis of aesthetic metrics and individual differences in aesthetic preferences in scientific research are discussed as possible collaboration areas for designers.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document