The first glance is the weakest: “Tasteful” individuals are slower to judge visual art

Abstract

Recent research (Myszkowski, Çelik, & Storme, 2018) has suggested that the ability to form accurate visual aesthetic judgments – an ability referred to as aesthetic sensitivity (Child, 1964), or “good taste” (Eysenck, 1983) – could be explained by the extent to which one taps into extensive processing strategies when facing aesthetic objects. Because individual differences in processing extensiveness may lead to different processing speed, we hypothesize that individuals with high visual aesthetic sensitivity present slower responding to visual aesthetic sensitivity tasks – even without time constraints. 201 adults took the Visual Aesthetic Sensitivity Test-Revised (Myszkowski & Storme, 2017), and their responses and response times were analyzed through joint hierarchical item-response theory modeling (van der Linden & Fox, 2016). As hypothesized, latent speed was negatively correlated at −0.47 (95% HPD [−0.61, −0.32]) with latent accuracy. Similar findings were obtained, accounting for guessing or not, including aberrant response patterns or not. In addition, more difficult items were also more time intensive. These findings are discussed as a substantiation that an important explanation for individual differences in visual aesthetic sensitivity lies in how much individuals are disposed to extensively process aesthetic objects.