Speed of person perception affects immediate and ongoing aesthetic evaluation

Recent studies have shed light on how aesthetic judgments are formed following presentations lasting less than a second. Meanwhile, dedicated neural mechanisms are understood to enable the rapid detection of human faces, bodies, and actions. On the basis of cognitive studies of: (i) the speed and acuity of person perception, and (ii) preferential attention given to human imagery (e.g., faces and bodies), we hypothesize that the visual detection of humans in portraits increases the magnitude and stability (i.e., similarity to later responses) of aesthetic ratings. Ease of person perception is also expected to elicit longer durations of preferential viewing time, a surplus measure of viewing behavior that should be positively related to subsequent ratings. To test these ideas, we use a set of cubist portraits previously established to be more or less categorizable in terms of the aggregate time required to perceive the depicted person. Using these images, we track aesthetic judgments made following short and unconstrained presentations; in an intervening task, we measure viewing behavior when subjects are able to selectively reveal regions of these images. We find that highly categorizable artworks (those that require less time to identify the figure as human) elicit higher and more predictive aesthetic ratings following 30 ms presentations while also eliciting longer viewing durations. Changes in ratings throughout the task are positively correlated with cumulative viewing time; critically, an image's categorizability level further moderates the strength of this relationship. These results demonstrate that a particular kind of visual object recognition – the recognition of human forms – modulates aesthetic preferences at a glance, subsequent viewing patterns, as well as rating changes over time.