Cognitive Processing Modifies Aesthetic Taste And Aesthetic Reliability

In reality,there are various forms of aesthetic processing,either as brief,rapid,and general as "a glimpse",or as long,detailed,and profound as "thoughtful".Therefore,there must exist different styles of cognitive processing in aesthetic judgements.In recent years,the topic of "Aesthetic Taste" has focused on the degree to which individuals agree on aesthetic judgements,where the impact of different cognitive processing styles has not been clearly distinguished and reported.Given that aesthetic styles affect aesthetic judgements in a common way,it’s necessary that the study of "aesthetic taste" should incorporate this factor.Therefore,this study mainly explores whether different cognitive processing styles have an impact on aesthetic taste.Previous research has reported that natural stimuli as faces and landscapes are accompanied with more shared taste compared to artifactual objects as architecture and art.Therefore,this study also includes stimulus types as another factor,i.e.,faces and artistic paintings,the former representing natural domains and the latter representing artifactual domains,to explore the interaction between aesthetic processing styles and stimulus types.According to the PIA model(the Pleasure-Interest Model of Aesthetic Liking,Graf & Landwehr,2015)and Sternberg’s cognitive processing theory(1985),this study explores whether different cognitive processings such as "automatic processing" and "controlled processing" can lead to changes in aesthetic taste in different types of stimuli.The former is manipulated as short viewing time and intuitive judgments,while the latter is manipulated as free viewing and careful judgements based on deliberate processing.This study includes a pretest and three formal experiments: 1)In the pretest experiment,a group of subjects were asked to make beauty evaluations on a bunch of faces and artistic paintings.30 faces and 30 artistic paintings were selected with similar beauty-score distributions,which were used as stimuli in the following experiments.2)Experiment 1 explored the impact of cognitive processing styles on aesthetic taste,and also tested the existence of interaction between processing styles and stimulus types.The results showed that controlled processing led to a decline in shared taste as well as the test-retest reliability of aesthetic judgments.3)In Experiment 2,the interval between repeated rounds of aesthetic judgements was extended from minutes to about a week.The results showed that the effect of controlled processing decreasing aesthetic taste and test-retest reliability was not because of memory,but might be a result of instability of psychological associations.4)Experiment 3 replaced the free title-naming task in the controlled processing condition with a much easier word-picture matching task(another questionnaire study was conducted to collect words used in Exp.3 in order to restrict psychological associations caused by the title naming task,while assuring that subjects processed stimuli in a controlled way.This design was to explore whether the controlled processing leading to a decrease in both shared taste and test-retest reliability was caused by the more diverse and unstable psychological associations.The results showed that controlled processing decreasing test-retest reliability was due to psychological associations’ instability,but controlled processing decreasing shared taste was not due to psychological associations’ variability.According to the PIA model,this might result from more variable patterns of “disfluency reduction” in controlled processing than those of “fluency discrepancy” in automatic processing.In conclusion,this study has demonstrated that: 1)compared to automatic styles of aesthetic processing,the controlled processing style can cause much lower aesthetic shared taste as well as an obvious decline in the test-retest reliability of aesthetic judgements;2)There is an interaction between stimulus types and aesthetic processing styles.For the automatic processing,this study repeated the conclusion that "the aesthetic shared taste of stimuli from natural domains is higher than those from artificial domains" from previous research.While in the controlled processing,the shared taste of both stimulus types significantly decreased to a similar level.3)controlled processing can decrease aesthetic test-retest reliability and this is not because of memory but might be partly due to unstable psychological associations.4)the possibility that controlled processing reducing shared taste was due to variability in psychological associations can be ruled out.According to the PIA model,this effect might result from more variability of “disfluency reduction” patterns in the controlled processing.