Aesthetic Appreciation of Landscapes

Dynamics of aesthetic appreciation

Aesthetic appreciation is a complex cognitive processing with inherent aspects of cold as well as hot cognition. Research from the last decades of empirical has shown that evaluations of aesthetic appreciation are highly reliable. Most frequently, facial attractiveness was used as the corner case for investigating aesthetic appreciation. Evaluating facial attractiveness shows indeed high intern...

Aesthetic Appreciation Explicated

A model of aesthetic appreciation and aesthetic judgments.

Although aesthetic experiences are frequent in modern life, there is as of yet no scientifically comprehensive theory that explains what psychologically constitutes such experiences. These experiences are particularly interesting because of their hedonic properties and the possibility to provide self-rewarding cognitive operations. We shall explain why modern art's large number of individualize...

The neural foundations of aesthetic appreciation.

The study of the cognitive and neural underpinnings of aesthetic appreciation by means of neuroimaging techniques has yielded a wealth of fascinating information. Although the results of these studies have been somewhat divergent, here we provide an integrative view of the early approaches, which identified some of the core mechanisms involved in aesthetic preference. Then, a number of more spe...

The cycle of preference: long-term dynamics of aesthetic appreciation.

According to evolutionary psychology people prefer curved objects. We provide evidence that preferences for curved objects might be biologically motivated, but can also be, at least partly, modulated by fashion, trends or Zeitgeist effects. In four studies, participants (n1=38, n2=40, n3=38, n4=38) rated the curvature and appreciation of car models for ten 5-y periods (1950-1999). A parabolic f...