TY - JOUR
T1 - Evaluative judgment across domains
T2 - Liking balance, contour, symmetry and complexity in melodies and visual designs
AU - Clemente, Ana
AU - Pearce, Marcus T
AU - Skov, Martin
AU - Nadal, Marcos
N1 - Copyright © 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
PY - 2021/7
Y1 - 2021/7
N2 - Evaluative judgment-i.e., assessing to what degree a stimulus is liked or disliked-is a fundamental aspect of cognition, facilitating comparison and choosing among alternatives, deciding, and prioritizing actions. Neuroimaging studies have shown that evaluative judgment involves the projection of sensory information to the reward circuit. To investigate whether evaluative judgments are based on modality-specific or modality-general attributes, we compared the extent to which balance, contour, symmetry, and complexity affect liking responses in the auditory and visual modalities. We found no significant correlation for any of the four attributes across sensory modalities, except for contour. This suggests that evaluative judgments primarily rely on modality-specific sensory representations elaborated in the brain's sensory cortices and relayed to the reward circuit, rather than abstract modality-general representations. The individual traits art experience, openness to experience, and desire for aesthetics were associated with the extent to which design or compositional attributes influenced liking, but inconsistently across sensory modalities and attributes, also suggesting modality-specific influences.
AB - Evaluative judgment-i.e., assessing to what degree a stimulus is liked or disliked-is a fundamental aspect of cognition, facilitating comparison and choosing among alternatives, deciding, and prioritizing actions. Neuroimaging studies have shown that evaluative judgment involves the projection of sensory information to the reward circuit. To investigate whether evaluative judgments are based on modality-specific or modality-general attributes, we compared the extent to which balance, contour, symmetry, and complexity affect liking responses in the auditory and visual modalities. We found no significant correlation for any of the four attributes across sensory modalities, except for contour. This suggests that evaluative judgments primarily rely on modality-specific sensory representations elaborated in the brain's sensory cortices and relayed to the reward circuit, rather than abstract modality-general representations. The individual traits art experience, openness to experience, and desire for aesthetics were associated with the extent to which design or compositional attributes influenced liking, but inconsistently across sensory modalities and attributes, also suggesting modality-specific influences.
KW - Aesthetic sensitivity
KW - Images
KW - Liking
KW - Linear mixed-effects models
KW - Modality-specific
KW - Music
KW - Sensory valuation
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85104281701&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.bandc.2021.105729
DO - 10.1016/j.bandc.2021.105729
M3 - Journal article
C2 - 33887654
SN - 0278-2626
VL - 151
SP - 1
EP - 12
JO - Brain and Cognition
JF - Brain and Cognition
M1 - 105729
ER -