Journal article 709 views 79 downloads
Aesthetic appeal influences visual search performance
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Siné McDougall
Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, Volume: 84, Pages: 2483 - 2506
Swansea University Author:
Irene Reppa
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Copyright: The Author(s) 2022. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
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DOI (Published version): 10.3758/s13414-022-02567-3
Abstract
Aesthetic appeal of a visual image can influence performance in time-critical tasks, even if it is irrelevant to the task. This series of experiments examined whether aesthetic appeal can act as an object attribute that guides visual search. If appeal enhances the salience of the targets pre-attenti...
| Published in: | Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics |
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| ISSN: | 1943-3921 1943-393X |
| Published: |
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
2022
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| Online Access: |
Check full text
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| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa61395 |
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| Abstract: |
Aesthetic appeal of a visual image can influence performance in time-critical tasks, even if it is irrelevant to the task. This series of experiments examined whether aesthetic appeal can act as an object attribute that guides visual search. If appeal enhances the salience of the targets pre-attentively, then appealing icons would lead to more efficient searches than unappealing targets and, conversely, appeal of distractors would reduce search efficiency. Three experiments (N = 112) examined how aesthetic appeal influences performance in a classic visual search task. In each experiment, participants completed 320 visual search trials, with icons varying in rated aesthetic appeal and either visual complexity (Experiments 1 and 2) of concreteness (Experiment 3) among two, four, eight, or 11 distractor icons. While target appeal did not influence search efficiency it sped up search times in all three experiments: appealing targets led to faster response time (RT) than unappealing targets across all experiments, and compared to neutral distractors, appealing distractors slowed search RT down. These findings are the first to show that an object’s aesthetic appeal influences visual search performance. |
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| College: |
Faculty of Medicine, Health and Life Sciences |
| Start Page: |
2483 |
| End Page: |
2506 |