In the eye of the beholder?
Mapping and understanding appearance, appreciation, and their interrelations in multidimensional stimulus spaces
Aesthetic appreciation is inherently multidimensional: many different stimulus dimensions and multiple levels of perceptual processing shape our appreciation for a stimulus. Previous research either lost parametric control by using naturalistic stimuli, or used parametrically controlled but unidimensional stimuli. Furthermore, perceptual influences on appreciation were often ignored. In addition, many studies focused either on the individual or the population level of aesthetic experience, leaving the relative importance of each unclear.
The project addresses each of these limitations. At the population level, I will enable the characterization of perceptual and aesthetic evaluations for fine-grained, high-dimensional parametric stimulus spaces by combining two recent developments: the OCTA toolbox for stimulus creation and Gibbs Sampling with People for efficiently sampling the high-dimensional space. At the individual level, I will contribute to a process-level explanation of aesthetic appreciation by extensively characterizing a group of individuals in terms of their perceptual and aesthetic processing abilities and experience. To integrate the results at the individual and the population level, I will estimate the relative contribution of individual differences to aesthetic appreciation for the parametric stimulus space of interest.