Automatic processes in aesthetic judgment: Insights from the implicit association test

Abstract

This study employed the Implicit Association Test (IAT) with aim to examine the nature of automatic aesthetic judgment. The main hypothesis was that basic hedonic tone of artwork is one of important factors influencing automatic aesthetic evaluation. We conducted two experiments in which we varied hedonic valence of paintings of figural (Experiment 1) and abstract art (Experiment 2), measured participants' implicit association between these paintings and evaluative attribute dimension via IAT and registered their explicit judgments of paintings' hedonic tone. In both experiments we found that participants were significantly faster in those dual-categorization tasks in the IAT where preselected hedonically 'positive' paintings were paired with the positive attributes and hedonically 'negative' ones with the negative attributes than the other way around. We additionally found that explicit assessments of the hedonic tone were substantially related to the individual IAT effects in the case of abstract art, but not in the case of figural art. Implications of these findings are discussed.