| Lerninhalte |
"Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.” What underlies this cliché is a belief shared among many, including great philosophers such as David Hume and Immanuel Kant, that aesthetic judgements are subjective, a matter of personal taste; hence, not to be argued. The implication of this view is that aesthetic experience as a subject of scientific inquiry is inevitably challenging – for strictly-controlled experimental manipulations and quantitative measurements, thus reducing complex sensations and emotions down to numbers, cannot seem more counterintuitive, if not impossible. Yet, aesthetic experience is ubiquitous and universal. Even without consciously contemplating beauty, our aesthetic preferences influence many of our day-to-day choices beyond pure hedonism – from purchase decisions of products, partner selection, to voting behaviour in elections, all of which have real-world consequences. This makes understanding aesthetic experiences a necessary piece of the puzzle in psychology. This course aims to advance students’ empirical understanding of the factors that modulate aesthetic judgements as a universal human experience using facial attractiveness, visual art and architecture appreciation as cases in which principles of perceptual and cognitive processing apply.
Course objectives
- To appreciate the relationship between fundamental and advanced processes of visual perception and cognition and aesthetic appreciation
- To understand and be able to critically evaluate theories concerning the psychology of aesthetic experiences
- To gain insight from the latest research in the psychology of aesthetics and art
Proposed topics:
- The philosophical roots of beauty and early experimental aesthetics
- Objective standard of beauty – Plato, Aristotle; beauty as subjective experience – Hume, Kant; psychophysics and aesthetic judgements – Wundt, Berlyne
- Contemporary theories concerning the psychology of aesthetics and art
- Arousal theories; evolutionary theories; perceptual fluency hypothesis; information processing frameworks (e.g. perceptual-cognitive models)
- Facial attractiveness
- Unchangeable and transient facial properties and attractiveness
- Aesthetic preferences in colours and spatial properties
- Recent findings and their theoretical implications
- Visual attention and aesthetic processing
- Eye-tracking methodology, top-down influences
- Image statistics and the appreciation of visual art
- Bottom-up approach, fundamentals of image statistics (e.g. fractals, complexity)
- The neural basis of aesthetic emotion
- Findings from neurological studies
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