Influence Of Aesthetic Feeling On Duration Perception

Duration perception is one of the most important components of time cognition.It refers to the individual's subjective perception of the persistence of objective phenomena.Unlike the objectivity of clock time,duration perception changes adaptively with various subjective and objective factors.As the famous physicist Albert Einstein said: Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it feels like an hour;while sitting next to a pretty girl for an hour,it feels like a minute.Duration perception can be affected by aesthetic feeling.Aesthetic feeling refers to the individual's subjective feelings of stimulating beauty.It is a complex psychological experience phenomenon,which can be induced by conscious aesthetic activities(such as appreciating landscapes,appraising paintings)or obtained under unconscious condition,and has three distinct features:(1)It is derived from the subjective appetite of the individual,with obvious subjectivity;(2)is a pleasant feeling;(3)usually causes physiological arousal.Previous studies have used faces as experimental materials to examine the influence of aesthetic feeling on duration perception.These studies have generally found that the aesthetic feeling significantly prolongs duration perception,and inferred that attention and arousal may play important roles in this phenomenon.However,there are still problems worth considering and exploring.First,the influence of the aesthetic feeling on duration perception needs further verification.Previous studies only tested face stimuli and ignored other aesthetic stimuli.Human cognitive processing of the face has specific advantages,so it is difficult to rule out the stimulus specificity of temporal prolong-effect of aesthetic feeling;on the other hand,previous studies ignored the subjectivity of aesthetics,presented same stimuli to different participants,which may reduce the stability of the results due to individual differences in aesthetics;besides,previous studies also ignored the pleasure and arousal features of aesthetic feeling,lacking the evaluation of the pleasure and arousal of experimental materials,thus their aesthetic feeling inducing might be unstable,which harmed the results.Second,the role of arousal and attention in the influence of aesthetic feeling on duration perception remains to be explored.Although previous studies have inferred that arousal and attention may play important roles in the influence of aesthetic feeling on duration perception based on their results and the psychological model,these inferences have not been tested experimentally and lacked comparison of stimulus types.Third,previous studies have only used behavioral results as an indicator,lacking support from neuroelectrophysiological indicators.Although behavioral indicator is one of the most common and wide-ranging evidence in psychological research,behavioral indicator usually reflects the sum of the coding,storage,extraction,and output stages.Since the coding stage is largely considered to reflect the perception,this means that directly examining the coding stage can better illustrate the influence of aesthetic feeling on duration perception.As a supplement to the evidence of behavior,Event-Related Potential techniques can be used to provide neuroelectrophysiological evidence for the influence of aesthetic feeling on duration perception.Therefore,the current study used face and landscape pictures as the material to induce the aesthetic feeling,used temporal reproduction task to measure duration perception,adopted delayed response paradigm and unconscious expression inhibition paradigm to manipulate arousal,adopted dual-task paradigm and the exogenous distraction paradigm to manipulate attention,and used Event-Related Potentials as the neuroelectrophysiological indicators to study the influence of aesthetic feeling on duration perception.The current study aims to answer:(1)How does aesthetic feeling influence duration perception?(2)What roles do the arousal and attention play in the influence of aesthetic feeling on duration perception? Do they differ in the role of different types of aesthetic feeling on duration perception?(3)What are the neuroelectrophysiological characteristics of aesthetic feeling that influence duration perception?The current work intended to explore the questions above by four studies.Study 1 aimed to examine the influence of aesthetic feeling on duration perception.Study 2 and 3 aimed to separately explore the role of arousal and attention in the influence of aesthetic feeling on duration perception.Study 4 aimed to use event-related potential techniques to investigate the neuroelectrophysiological characteristics of the influence of aesthetic feeling on duration perception.In all studies,to avoid the influence of aesthetic subjectivity on aesthetic feeling,the participants needed to evaluate and select experimental materials based on their aesthetic criteria before experiments.Study 1 included three experiments.Experiment 1 examined the effect of face and landscape pictures on the aesthetic feeling inducing.Using the aesthetics,pleasure,arousal rating score of stimuli as indicators,Experiment 1 found that the attractive opposite-sex face and the beautiful landscape pictures are appropriate for inducing the aesthetic feeling.Experiment 2 used the opposite-sex face picture as the experimental material to investigate the influence of aesthetic feeling on duration perception,and found that the aesthetic feeling of faces prolongs the duration perception;Experiment 3 used the landscape picture as the experimental material to investigate the influence of aesthetic feeling on duration perception and also found that the aesthetic feeling of landscape also prolongs the duration perception.Further correlation analysis found that the higher the subjects' rating for stimulus' s aesthetic,pleasure and arousal,the longer their duration perception.The results of Study 1 demonstrated that aesthetic feeling has a stable prolong-effect on duration perception.Study 2 used a delayed response paradigm(Experiment4)and unconscious expression inhibition paradigm(Experiment5)to manipulate arousal to investigate the role of arousal in the influence of aesthetic feeling on duration perception.The design of Experiment 4 is based on the characteristics that the effect of arousal on duration perception would gradually weaken with time.Experiment 4 deliberately delay the waiting time before the temporal reproduction response to make the arousal difference between time coding and time reproduction prominent.It was found that the delayed response significantly enhanced the prolong-effect of facial aesthetic feeling on duration perception,but it did not significantly affect the prolong-effect of landscape-induced aesthetic feeling on duration perception.To avoid the limitation of potential memory disturbance in delayed response manipulation,Experiment 5 used the sentence sorting task to prime the unconscious expression suppression to reduce arousal and found that the unconscious expression suppression reduced the temporal prolonging effect of aesthetic feeling inducing by both face and landscape picture,but it is greater for the faceinduced aesthetic feeling.The results of Study 2 suggest that the lower level of arousal,the smaller temporal prolonging effect,and it has a more salient influence on the temporal prolong-effect of face-induced aesthetic feeling.Study 3 used the dual-task paradigm(Experiment6)and the exogenous distraction paradigm(Experiment7)to manipulate attention to investigate the role of attention in the influence of aesthetic feeling on duration perception.The dual-task paradigm of Experiment 6 includes attention allocation condition and no-allocation condition.The attention allocation condition requires participants to allocate their attention to temporal reproduction task and familiarity scoring task,while the no-allocation condition only requires participants to allocate their attention to temporal reproduction task.The results showed that attention allocation effectively eliminated the temporal prolong-effect of landscape-induced aesthetic feeling,but the temporal prolong-effect of face-induced aesthetic feeling was still observed.The design of Experiment 7 is based on the attention bias of salient stimuli.The stimuli were placed into complex frames to make the complex frame interfere with the participants' attention to stimuli,thereby achieving attention manipulation.The results showed that the attention manipulation reduced the temporal prolong-effect of aesthetic feeling inducing by both face and landscape picture,but it is greater in landscape picture condition.The results of Study 3 suggest that the lower level of attention,the smaller temporal prolonging effect,and it has a more salient influence on the temporal prolong-effect of landscape-induced aesthetic feeling.Study 4 combined with event-related potential technique and temporal reproduction task.Using the event-related potential components P1,N170,VPP,P2,and CNV as the indicator to examine the neuroelectrophysiological characteristics of the influence of aesthetic feeling on duration perception,including an experiment of the face(Experiment8)and an experiment of landscape picture(Experiment9).At the behavioral level,Study 4 repeated the results of Study 1: Experiment 8 found that the duration perception for the high-aesthetic-rating faces was significantly longer than that of the lowaesthetic-rating faces,Experiment 9 also found that the duration perception for the highaesthetic-rating landscape pictures was significantly longer than that of the low-aestheticrating landscape pictures.At the level of neuroelectrophysiology,the results of Experiment 8 showed that high-aesthetic-rating faces induced stronger CNV amplitudes than low-aesthetic-rating faces did,Experiment 9 also obtained similar results,that is,high-aesthetic-rating landscape pictures induced stronger CNV amplitudes than the lowaesthetic-rating landscape pictures did.Further correlation analyses found that there were significant correlations between behavioral results and neuroelectrophysiological results in both Experiment 8 and 9,that is,the greater the prolong-effect of aesthetic feeling,the greater difference in the amplitude of CNV.The results of Study 4 suggest that the neuroelectrophysiological characteristic of the influence of aesthetic feeling on duration perception is that the high-aesthetic-rating stimuli induce stronger CNV amplitude than the low-aesthetic-rating stimuli do.In summary,the current work adopted face and landscape pictures as the material,used innovative experimental paradigms to manipulate the arousal and attention,and took full account of the subjectivity in aesthetics to explore the influence of aesthetic feeling on duration perception from the perspectives of phenomena,influence factors,and neuroelectrophysiological characteristics.The results showed that(1)Aesthetic feeling stably results in the prolong-effect of duration perception,that is,the duration perception of the high-aesthetic-rating stimuli is longer than that of low-aesthetic-rating stimuli.(2)Both reduction of arousal and the attention in aesthetic feeling can effectively reduce the temporal prolong-effect of aesthetic feeling,but the arousal plays a more dominating role in the temporal prolong-effect of face-induced aesthetic feeling,while the attention plays a more dominating role in the temporal prolong-effect of landscape-induced aesthetic feeling.(3)The neuroelectrophysiological characteristic of the influence of aesthetic feeling on duration perception is that high-aesthetic-rating stimuli induce stronger CNV amplitudes than low-aesthetic-rating stimuli do.These results are of great significance for revealing the influence of aesthetic feeling on duration perception,indicate that the temporal prolong-effect of aesthetic feeling is stable,and this phenomenon is a result of a combination of various factors.Future research should further explore the influence of aesthetic feeling on duration perception from the perspectives of the relationship between the value system and the aesthetic feeling,the difference between the aesthetic feeling and the positive emotional feeling,the influence mechanism of aesthetic feeling on duration perception,and the interaction between aesthetic feeling and duration perception.