Attentional Bias to Beauty with Evolutionary Benefits: Evidence from Aesthetic Appraisal of Landscape Architecture.

Wei Zhang,Xianyou He,Shuxian Lai,Xiaoxiang Tang

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00071

Wei Zhang, Xianyou He + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00071

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Abstract

Substantial evidence suggests that beauty is associated with the survival and reproduction of organisms. Landscape architecture is composed of a series of natural elements that have significant evolutionary implications. The present study used one pilot material ratings and three experiments to examine the mechanisms of aesthetic appraisals of landscape architecture. The results confirmed that landscape architecture elicited a sense of beauty and captured visual attention more easily than other types of architecture during explicit aesthetic rating task (Experiment 1) and implicit aesthetic perception task (dot-probe paradigm, Experiment 2). Furthermore, the spatial cueing paradigm revealed that response latencies were significantly faster for landscape architecture than non-landscape architecture on valid trials, but there was no significant difference in this contrast on invalid trials at 150-ms stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA, Experiment 3a). At 500-ms SOA (Experiment 3b), participants responded significantly faster for landscape architecture on valid trials, but reacted significantly slower for landscape architecture on invalid trials. The findings indicated that the beauty of landscape architecture can be perceived implicitly, and only faster orienting of attention, but not delayed disengagement of attention was generated at early stages of the processing of landscape architecture. However, the attentional bias at later stages of attentional processes may be resulted from both faster orienting of attention and delayed disengagement of attention from landscape architecture photographs.

Highlights

Imagine you are beholding landscape architecture either in person or through photographs
There was no significant main effect of types of architecture on the aesthetic rating scores, which replicated the similar findings of the pilot study of material ratings, we still found significant differences in the ration times (RTs) of aesthetic ratings, which revealed that response latencies were faster for classical landscape architecture photographs than for non-landscape architecture photographs, F(1,39) = 4.81, p = 0.034, η2 = 0.11
In Experiment 2, we used the dot-probe paradigm to investigate whether there was an attentional bias toward classical landscape architecture photographs, and we tried to provide preliminary evidence to verify that the beauty of classical landscape architecture can be perceived implicitly

Summary

Introduction

Imagine you are beholding landscape architecture (e.g., classical gardens of Suzhou, China) either in person or through photographs. Real scenarios with visual elements such as water sources, green plants, and open space (Dutton, 2009), and audio clips with sound of water were more judged as beautiful (see Seghers, 2015). This aesthetic preference could be interpreted as an adaptive value that might be important for the survival and reproduction of organisms. Following the logic of evolutionary aesthetics and evolutionary psychology, we asked the question of whether landscape architecture would elicit a sense of beauty more than other types of architecture because it is a type of architecture that consists of elements (e.g., water, green plants, and rockeries) that have significant evolutionary implications

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