ERPs of aesthetic processing 1 Electrophysiological correlates of aesthetic processing of webpages: A comparison of experts and laypersons

We investigated whether design experts or laypersons evaluate webpages differently. Twenty participants, 10 experts and 10 laypersons, judged the aesthetic value of a webpage in an EEG-experiment. Screenshots of 150 webpages, judged aesthetic or unaesthetic by different sample of 136 participants, served as stimulus material. Behaviorally experts and laypersons evaluated unaesthetic webpages similarly but they differed in their evaluation of aesthetic webpages. Experts evaluated aesthetic webpages more often as unaesthetic than laypersons did. The ERP-data show difference between experts and laypersons and between aesthetic and unaesthetic webpages. In a time-window of 110-130ms after stimulus onset, aesthetic webpages elicited a more negative EEG-amplitude than unaesthetic webpages. Experts had more negative EEG-amplitude than layperson. There was no interaction of expertise and aesthetics. This patterning of results continued until a time window of 600-800ms in which group and aesthetic differences diminished. An interaction of perceiver and object, as interactionist theories postulate, was absent in the EEG-data. Experts seem to process the stimuli in a more thorough manner than laypersons. The early activation differences between aesthetic and unaesthetic webpages is in contrast with some theories of aesthetic processing and has not been reported before. ERPs of aesthetic processing 3