The Impact of Depth of Aesthetic Processing and Visual-Feature Transformations on Recognition Memory for Artworks and Constructed Design Patterns

We conducted a study to examine how people perceptually encode and then recognize real artworks and constructed design patterns. We first manipulated depth of processing during an incidental perceptual encoding task (Phase 1) wherein participants made both affective/aesthetic and cognitive judgments. For painting stimuli, the contrast was between liking (yes/no) and a search for food in the paintings (present/absent). For design stimuli, the comparison was between liking and relative similarity of figure and ground in terms of color or texture. In Phase 2, we examined the effects of transforming visual features (i.e., color and texture) of the original stimuli on performance in a surprise recognition-memory task. Consistent with a depth-of-processing hypothesis, affective (i.e., liking) processing led to deeper perceptual encoding but, counter to our predictions, did not lead to better performance in the recognition-memory task. This benefit of aesthetic processing in the encoding phase was only observed with artworks but not with constructed design patterns that lacked salient semantic content. Moreover, texture transformations were discerned more accurately than color transformations across the different stimulus sets and tasks. This underscores the primacy of bottom-up processing of elementary stimulus features over top-down instructions to make affective judgments or search for semantic content.