Conference Programme
Thursday August 20, 2026
| Time | Event | Poster session | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 09:00–10:00 | Registration + Coffee | ||
| 10:00–10:30 | Opening Address | ||
| 10:30–11:30 | Keynote by Alan Blackwell | ||
| 11:30–12:00 | Coffee Break | Poster session Empirical Aesthetics & Perception | |
| 12:00–13:00 |
Talk session Ambiguity, Dynamism & Attention Talk session Colour, Light & Context |
||
| 13:00–14:00 | Lunch | ||
| 14:00–15:30 | Symposium Applications of Virtual Reality in Empirical Visual Aesthetics | ||
| 15:30–16:00 | Break; Group Photo | ||
| 16:00–17:30 | Artist Workshop / Participatory Demo | ||
Friday August 21, 2026
| Time | Event | Poster session | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 09:30–10:30 | Keynote by Semir Zeki | ||
| 10:30–11:00 | Coffee Break | ||
| 11:00–12:30 | Symposium Composition, hierarchical organization, and aesthetics of images: Interdisciplinary perspectives and recent developments | ||
| 12:30–13:30 | Lunch | Poster session Technology & Perception | |
| 13:30–14:30 |
Talk session Composition & Expertise Talk session Aesthetic Experience, Emotion & the Body |
||
| 14:30–15:00 | Break | ||
| 15:00–17:00 | Symposium Can we know the dancer from the dance? | ||
| 17:00–18:00 | Artist Workshop / Participatory Demo | Business meeting | |
Saturday August 22, 2026
| Time | Event | Poster session | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 09:30–10:30 | Artist Talk | ||
| 10:30–11:00 | Coffee Break | ||
| 11:00–12:30 | Symposium Accessibility Enhancement to Visual Arts & Science by Technology | ||
| 12:30–13:30 | Lunch | Poster session Empirical Aesthetics & AI/Technology | |
| 13:30–14:30 |
Talk session Designing Immersive & Interface Experiences Talk session Generative AI: Perception, Aesthetics & Creative |
||
| 14:30–15:00 | Break | ||
| 15:00–16:00 | Artist Demo / Interactive Presentation | ||
| 16:00–16:30 | Closing Address | ||
Instructions for presenters
Speakers in Talk Sessions and Symposia
All talks are allocated 15 minutes. We recommend limiting your presentation to 10 minutes and allowing 5 minutes for questions and discussion.
There are no restrictions on presentation format; however, a 16:9 landscape layout is recommended. Please also prepare a PDF version of your presentation as a backup in case your original format cannot be displayed correctly.
Please submit your presentation by 14 August 2026 by emailing it to VSAC2026@kcl.ac.uk.
An example:
- Email subject line: TALK_999: Title of Submission / POSTER_999: Title of Submission
- Presentation file name: TALK_999.pptx
Late submissions may be considered a no-show and may not be included in the conference programme.
If you are using PowerPoint, we recommend using standard fonts to minimise the risk of formatting issues. Please ensure that any videos or audio files are embedded within the presentation rather than linked externally. After uploading, verify that all videos, audio, and animations function correctly.
If your presentation requires special software, hardware, or other features that necessitate the use of your own laptop, please contact VSAC2026@kcl.ac.uk in advance for further instructions.
Posters
Please prepare your poster in DIN A0 format (841 × 1189 mm) and ensure that it is printed in portrait orientation. Landscape-format posters cannot be accommodated, as they will not fit properly on the poster boards.
Materials for mounting your poster will be provided at the venue. Due to space limitations, posters will be displayed only during the designated poster sessions and will not remain on display throughout the conference. Presenters are therefore required to be present during their assigned poster session and to remove their poster promptly at the end of the session. Any posters left on the boards after the session may be removed by the conference organisers.
Keynote speakers
Alan Blackwell
- Professor of Interdisciplinary Design at the University of Cambridge;
- Cognition Scientist and Professor at the Computer Laboratory;
- Co-Director of Cambridge Global Challenges;
- Fellow of Darwin College
Alan Blackwell is Professor of Interdisciplinary Design in the Cambridge Department of Computer Science and Technology. Following an early career as an AI engineer, responsible for the design of novel user interfaces and programming languages, he completed a PhD in cognitive neuroscience, investigating the topic of Metaphor in Diagrams. His subsequent research interests have included computational arts (including music notation and perception, choreography, and live coding), and the role of notation in wide range of technical, craft and design practices. In addition to these areas of critical technical practice, he applies methods from STS and Anthropology for intercultural perspectives on design, computation and AI, as described in his recent book Moral Codes: Designing Alternatives to AI. We are proud to announce that Professor Alan Blackwell will be joining VSAC 2026 as a keynote speaker at King’s College London. Professor Blackwell is Professor of Interdisciplinary Design in the Cambridge Department of Computer Science and Technology. His work spans AI, cognitive neuroscience, computational arts, and critical perspectives on design and technology. He is also the author of Moral Codes: Designing Alternatives to AI. Bringing together design, computation, creativity, and anthropology, his research offers a distinctive perspective on the relationship between technology, culture, and human experience. We are delighted to welcome Professor Blackwell to VSAC 2026 and look forward to his keynote lecture🌿
Keynote at 10:30–11:30 Thursday August 20, 2026
Semir Zeki
- Professor of Neuroaesthetics
- Fellow of Royal Society, Founder Fellow of Academy of Medical Sciences.
- Member of American Philosophical Society, European Academy of Sciences and Arts, International Honorary Member of American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- University College London, Cell & Developmental Biology
We are proud to announce that Professor Semir Zeki will be joining VSAC 2026 as a keynote speaker. This marks a significant highlight of this year’s programme, and we are honoured to welcome him to the conference at King’s College London. Professor Zeki is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Founder Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. His pioneering research has shaped our understanding of visual perception, aesthetic experience, and the brain’s role in acquiring knowledge. Widely recognised for his influential work in visual science and neuroaesthetics, he has helped redefine how we think about the relationship between perception, art, and beauty. His keynote at VSAC 2026 will explore how the brain gives rise to aesthetic experience, making him a distinguished and fitting speaker for the conference. We are delighted to host this distinguished lecture as part of VSAC 2026🌟
Keynote at 09:30–10:30 Friday August 21, 2026
Symposia
Symposium 1: Applications of Virtual Reality in Empirical Visual Aesthetics
14:00–15:30 Thursday August 20, 2026
Alexandra Victoria Alvarez1,2,3, Maximilian Kenzo Molitor4,5, Julian Salhofer6,7,8, & Adriano Tenore9
1Art Research on Transformation of Individuals and Societies Lab, Empirical Visual Aesthetics Lab, 2University of Vienna, AT, 3University for Continuing Education Krems, AT, 4Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien, Tübingen, Germany, 5University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany, 6Technische Universität Wien, 7University of Applied Sciences St. Pölten, 8University for Continuing Education Krems, 9Naples, Italy based Artist
As art institutions adopt virtual reality (VR) to expand access and engagement, visual aesthetics researchers are also increasingly incorporating these environments into experimental platforms. This symposium brings together four interdisciplinary perspectives, from cognition and emotion research to architectural education, conservation science, and artistic development, to examine how VR is being designed and applied in empirical projects with institutional collaborators. Together, the session situates VR as a research tool to learn about perception and art engagement across mediaities, increase museum objectives, and provide meaningful experiences for real-world viewers. After a scoping view, the session will conclude with live demonstrations of the VR rooms.
1
Exploring Emotions in Original, Digital, and Virtual Contexts at the Belvedere Museum
Art has long been noted within psychology for Einfü hlung, or “feeling in” to the affective state of another person or artwork. However today in the Post Digital age, an era marked by the ubiquity of technology, it is still unclear what is lost, translated, or gained when an artwork undergoes technological reproduction. Most research on differences between originals and reproductions has been heterogeneous: focusing on shallow assessments of emotion (e.g. valence and arousal), hedonic variables (e.g. liking and beauty), or evaluation methods (e.g. interestingness) that may fail to capture shifts in emotions within genuineness. Furthermore, the limited studies with inconclusive results often rely on low resolution digital surrogates rather than museum quality artworks and ecologically valid settings. To address this gap, the FWF funded project OrDiV (Original Digital Virtual) project applies emotion-based measures to characterize how the experience of an artwork changes as its mediality shifts. Conducted within the Upper Belvedere museum, OrDiV utilizes seven artworks from the collection featured in the exhibition Provocation and Psyche across the four conditions: original artworks in the exhibition room, high-quality digital reproductions viewed on a computer within the museum’s Oktogon, original artworks activated by phone-based augmented reality (AR), and a virtual reality (VR) identical-twin reconstruction of the original gallery experienced through a headset inside the Oktogon. Museum visitors (n=216), while equipped with mobile eye tracking, reported their felt affective and cognitive responses using a 16-item scale after engagement. By comparing experience types (disengaged, negative, transformative, harmonious, novel), and engagement patterns, we explore the results and implications afforded by virtual technologies in art experiences of the Post Digital age. This talk will also draw on this researcher’s role as PhD student coordinating collaboration between museum research, art history, empirical aesthetics, and VR applications.
2
Experiencing the Semi-Detached Houses of Le Corbusier: Aesthetic Experience and Learning of Architecture Across Media
A central goal of school excursions to architectural sites—such as the Semi-Detached Houses by Le Corbusier in Stuttgart, today renovated into a museum—is to enable students to experience architecture firsthand. This is based on the idea that architectural knowledge encompasses not only factual information but also an aesthetic experience (AE). Böhme conceptualizes this AE as the perceived ‘atmosphere’ of architecture, and Coburn et al. have found it to manifest on the dimensions of perceived hominess, coherence, and fascination. In the educational context, school visits to architectural sites are not always possible; slide-based presentations (i.e., PowerPoint) are often used instead. Virtual Reality (VR), however, may offer a more embodied and immersive alternative. Thus, this study investigates whether VR can improve students’ learning and AE of architecture compared to a tablet-based PowerPoint (RQ1), and whether higher interactivity across both media enhances these outcomes (RQ2). Grounded in the Cognitive-Affective Model of Immersive Learning (CAMIL), we hypothesize higher immersivity and higher interactivity would positively influence knowledge acquisition, perceived atmosphere, and perception of aesthetic dimensions (i.e., hominess, coherence, and fascination). A 2 × 2 between-subject design (medium × interactivity) experiment was designed, comparing interactive and non-interactive VR and PowerPoint learning environments. These environments were co-designed in collaboration with the museum Weißenhofmuseum im Haus Le Corbusier, Stuttgart, as well as schoolteachers, VR-developers and researchers in philosophy, art history and psychology. Participants (N = 128) will be school students who will experience a 15-minute learning session in one of the conditions followed by assessments of knowledge and AE. The experiment is currently being finalized, with data collection expected to be completed by the conference date. This talk will present the co-design process and empirical results of the experiment, contributing to the broader discussion on how and if VR can enrich both empirical aesthetics and architectural education.
3
When Artworks Change: Towards Immersive Exploration of Aging Processes in Oil Paintings on Canvas
Understanding how visible changes in materials over time shapes the perception of artworks is a persistent challenge in both empirical aesthetics and art conservation. Although the impact of environmental factors such as relative humidity (RH), temperature, and UV radiation on the condition and longevity of oil paintings on canvas is well established, their effects on perception remain challenging to examine under conditions that are both controlled and ecologically valid. This talk presents an ongoing PhD project that develops a virtual reality (VR) framework for the simulation and visualization of aging-related degradation processes in oil paintings on canvas. At its current stage, the work includes a high-fidelity 3D reconstruction of a selected painting from the State Collections of Lower Austria, produced through macro-photogrammetry and reflectance-based imaging. In addition, early experiments in digital restoration explore how a plausible undamaged reference state can be approximated. Building on these initial results, the talk outlines the next phases of the project: the development of computational models to simulate age- and environment-related degradation phenomena such as crack formation, discoloration, and paint loss, and their integration into an interactive VR environment. By combining physically based approaches with procedural and real-time rendering techniques, the system aims to balance scientific plausibility with computational performance, enabling dynamic exploration of environmental effects over time. Through these contributions, the system will serve as a valuable tool for conservators, curators, and other museum stakeholders, supporting preventive conservation strategies and enhancing public engagement by illustrating the complexities of art preservation. Furthermore, user studies involving eye-tracking and questionnaires will investigate how visual degradation influences aesthetic perception and emotional response to artworks. In doing so, the project contributes to broader discussions on how immersive technologies (such as VR) can support both cultural heritage research and empirical visual aesthetics.
4
An Artist’s Perspective: Designing a VR room for an Empirical Aesthetics Project
How does the medium through which we encounter art shape what we feel? This contribution presents the work of a CG AI Lead who served as lead VR environment designer and artistic collaborator within the Art Research on Transformation of Individuals and Societies Lab’s project investigating phenomenal states during art experience. Building on prior museum and screen-based cohorts, this American Psychological Association Division 10–funded study extends the research into virtual galleries by comparing an immersive VR condition with a desktop-based virtual gallery (OGAR), while maintaining experimental structure across conditions. The VR condition was designed as a sequence of six distinct viewing rooms, each presenting a single artwork, connected by a central lobby where participants paused to complete self-report using the 16-item Experience Typing Measure (ExTM) before continuing. The hexagonal lobby, developed in Unreal Engine 5.5 and deployed on Meta Quest 3, mirrors the pacing of the desktop condition. The environment was calibrated with a player height of 1.65m and movement speed of 3 m/s to standardize navigation while preserving embodied exploration. A progressive lighting system marked visited rooms, supporting orientation and memory, while a custom plugin recorded gaze direction, viewing duration per artwork, time spent in each room, and total session time. At the same time, design considerations were challenged by balancing methodological rigor with viewer enjoyment. This collaborator’s artistic practice is informed by anthropology and sociology to create immersive environments as sites where cultural, biological, and technological forces converge. Working across interactive and AI-mediated systems, his eco-punk biology informed perspective centers primal forms of perception and meaning activated through action and context. Within this project, he reflects on the constraints and possibilities of working as an artist in scientific settings where experimental control can put limits on expression, but also trigger creative thought through interdisciplinary collaboration.
Symposium 2: Composition, hierarchical organization, and aesthetics of images: Interdisciplinary perspectives and recent developments
11:00–12:30 Friday August 21, 2026
Johan Wagemans1,2,3
1University of Leuven, Department of Brain & Cognition, Faculty of Psychology & Educational Sciences, 2Leuven AI Institute, 3Leuven Brain Institute
Composition is a central topic of interest in art and aesthetics, both theories and practice, but much harder to operationalize, measure and manipulate, and therefore largely understudied in empirical and computational aesthetics. Recent progress in machine learning and generative AI tools has enabled a more systematic and quantitative approach than ever before. To become really useful and relevant for everyone working on composition, however, we need to ground this work more strongly in theories of perceptual organization and rely on high-quality images and high-quality data on human aesthetic appreciation. This symposium brings all these relevant disciplines and recent contributions together.
1
Composition, Hierarchical Organization, and Aesthetics of Images: Background and Preview
The composition of an image or artwork, the way the different elements are put together, can be strong or weak, rich or poor, good or bad, and is therefore essential for its aesthetic quality. Exactly what determines the value of a composition depends on many factors, as will be illustrated by various visual examples from Arnheim’s discussions of famous paintings and from photography textbooks and websites. I will clarify the underlying principles of perceptual organization (perceptual grouping, figure-ground organization), how they deliver the visual building blocks, how they establish the most obvious spatial relationships and in some cases also a strong hierarchical organization between parts and wholes, and how all of this can create balance as well as interesting ambiguities and tensions in the overall image. I will also review some empirical research on the role of these principles and phenomena in determining the aesthetics of images (professional photography and images of paintings), emphasizing the notion of visual rightness, but also highlighting the difficulties and limitations of this work. When discussing the complementary strengths and weaknesses of recent work in computational aesthetics, it will become clear that the different disciplines contributing to this area of research have much to learn from one another and that uniting the forces in innovative, interdisciplinary approaches will be needed to make substantial progress. I will argue that the time to do so is now. A preview of the other talks in this symposium will help to pave the way and clarify their interrelationships.
2
Empirically Defining, Manipulating and Deriving Composition
Despite its prominence in art theory and education, composition has received surprisingly little attention in empirical aesthetics. Across three extensive studies, we operationalize composition as a determinant of aesthetic preference and introduce a novel method for annotating it within complex natural and artistic imagery. First, in two large online rating studies (N~1300 each), we provide a foundation for positioning Composition within empirical aesthetics by investigating the concept’s relationship with important aesthetic measures, namely Pleasure, Interest, Order, Complexity, and Layout. Second, through three ranking studies, we manipulated and validated Balance, Emphasis, and Repetition independently, testing their respective impacts on aesthetic preference. Our open access stimulus set spans 63 motifs, each with a baseline version and versions with more or less of the targeted principle, which we validated through a within-triplet ranking task (N=37). With the same task (N=152) we demonstrated that stronger compositional presence significantly increases both preference and perceived composition quality relative to weaker or baseline versions. Finally, in a two-alternative forced-choice task (N=348) with all pairwise comparisons across the three levels and motifs, participants had to choose either the better-composed image or the one they preferred. Our Composition manipulations again consistently influenced participants’ rankings and choices regarding image composition and personal preferences. However, for Composition to have impact on aesthetics it must be perceptually derived from images. To investigate this process, our third study introduces a novel annotation tool that allows participants to annotate regions for 3 Composition and 5 Perceptual Grouping principles. Heatmaps and overlays illustrate the hierarchical nature of these regions and enable us to substantiate and quantify Composition in an innovative way. Throughout this work, we show that Composition has a real, empirically measurable effect on aesthetic appreciation and that participants are sensitive to Composition and can extract it from rich images.
3
Extracting Composition: Behavioral and Computational Approaches to Visual Structure
Image composition is central to visual aesthetics but remains difficult to formalize computationally and empirically. Furthermore, composition often consists of several nested sub-compositions. This contribution explores how compositional structure can be extracted from both behavioral and image-based data. We show that sub-compositions can be identified through either eye-tracking data or interactive user prompts. First, we show how eye-movement patterns can reveal hierarchical organization in visual composition. The aggregated saccadic data is transformed into a graph representation after preprocessing with an edge bundling algorithm. Sub-compositions are extracted by clustering sub-graphs based on node proximity (spatial coordinate differences) and edge weight (connection frequency across participants). The extracted sub-compositions align with human hierarchical perceptual grouping. Second, we review computational approaches for extracting compositional cues directly from images. We discuss recent developments in computer vision methods for identifying compositional structure. These include methods based on visual cues such as symmetry, pose estimation, and semantic segmentation. We also outline preliminary work on an interactive framework for composition line extraction. Together, these approaches illustrate how behavioral and computational perspectives can help characterize composition as a formalizable property of images. Extracting these visual structures opens the door for evaluating abstract aesthetic concepts such as symmetry, balance, and emphasis across different levels of the compositional hierarchy.
4
Understanding Image Composition through Perceptual Organization and Computational Modeling
Image composition organizes visual elements through perceptual grouping, where scenes are segmented into meaningful objects and structured by their spatial relationships. Although perceptual grouping is central to composition, existing work lacks a precise operational definition and well-annotated datasets that explicitly capture grouping structure. At the same time, most computational approaches rely on global image representations that do not provide explicit spatial correspondence between meaningful regions. Consequently, the role of perceptual grouping in shaping image composition remains unclear, both conceptually and computationally. In this talk, we present a tutorial on object-centric representations. These models learn representations that are more aligned with human perception, such that each region of an image is associated with a distinct and coherent representation. This property makes them particularly well-suited for studying visual composition, as it enables modeling relationships between regions and provides a clearer account of the spatial structure of a scene. We further highlight recent research directions on (1) deriving hierarchical visual organization from perceptual grouping data, including data collected from human observers, and (2) composition-preserving generation as a testbed for assessing how well compositional structure is maintained under transformation, offering a controlled setting to probe and validate compositional representations. Specifically, we consider a composition-controlled image synthesis framework based on scalable vector graphics (SVG) stimuli that encode structure, where generation is formulated as stimulus-guided image-to-image refinement with semantic and edge-based guidance to enforce structural consistency. This approach improves compositional structure preservation compared to both pixel-based controllable generation methods and existing SVG-based baselines. Together, these perspectives offer a unified view of how composition can be understood, represented, and evaluated, and point toward more principled approaches to modeling visual composition across perception and computation in a consistent and interpretable manner.
5
Panel Discussion
The symposium will end with a panel discussion in which we have asked colleagues from different disciplines to comment on the work we have presented from their perspective: What is new and interesting, what is the added value compared to what has been done before, but most of all, what is still missing? What are the current shortcomings and challenges? Three authorities have already committed to being a discussant, and one other is considering it: Aenne Brielmann (empirical and computational aesthetics), Aaron Hertzmann (photography and computer graphics), Jeroen Stumpel (art history), and Ian Verstegen (Arnheim, Gestalt psychology and visual studies). After a brief round of initial impressions, comments and questions, the audience will get the chance to engage in a Q&A on the issues being raised by the speakers and discussants.
Symposium 3: Can we know the dancer from the dance?
15:00–17:00 Friday August 21, 2026
Qasim Zaidi1 & Joan Danielle Ongchoco2
1Graduate Center for Vision Research State University of New York, USA, 2Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada
For Hegel, the human body was “too expressive for symbolic art, too saturated in […] meaning for classical art, too definitely formed for romantic art.” But this is perhaps what makes dance unique: that the human body is its medium. This symposium will consider dance across formats (from live performances to drawings) and genres (from ballet to Kpop), as it interacts with cognitive processes (from perception, memory, simulation, to social cognition). The goal is to explore not just how we perceive the dancer (or the dance), but also what dance might be able to tell us about broader human experience.
1
What’s a movement in the mind? Studies in how we parse, remember, and appreciate the human body in motion
Our appreciation for dance seems on the one hand idiosyncratic: there is incredible diversity in terms of dance genres and people’s preferences — and what parts of a dance captures people’s attention and emotions is a complex function of a range of postural, motor, and emotional dimensions. And yet on another hand, our capacity to be moved by a dancer and what they are trying to express seems so fundamental, making dance a powerful medium for human communication and expression. What is built into the human mind that draws us to dance? In the first study, I will talk about how we might be constantly building a ‘movement alphabet’, in which a single movement ‘step’ can be combined into ‘words’ that then form ‘phrases’ — the way we learn a language. This ability to parse regularities from dynamic motion might serve as the foundation for how dancers learn how to dance and how viewers learn to parse a choreography. In the second study, I will show how the memorability of a movement sequence may then be determined by the way the individual ‘steps’ are strung together — but that the most memorable movements are not only consistent across over observers (totalling N=2400), but also the ones that are counterintuitively the most ‘snapshot-like’. Finally, I will demonstrate how our aesthetic preferences for dance may be surprisingly systematic along the dimension of the speed at which it unfolds, such that there may be a ‘sweet spot’ of the amount of motion that aligns with the pace at which people also generally move in the world (with this being the most predictive factor, over and above the expressiveness and scale of the movement). Collectively these studies make a case for bridging the empirical aesthetics of dance with the broader cognitive science of the mind.
2
Dance beyond movement: Research on choreography as a contextualized investigation of the perceived organization and appreciation of dance
Over the past decades, research on dance has extended largely, going way beyond its neuroaesthetic origin. However, choreography, which provides the organizational layer of dance, has been missing from this discussion. In this talk, I provide an overview of a set of studies on the importance of choreography for aesthetic experiences. In a first study, we developed a conceptualization of order and complexity of choreography. This conceptualization was necessary to capture the dynamic component of these elements in dance and was validated by continuous ratings of participants on their perceived complexity in the performance. A combination of inductive and deductive analyses revealed statistically notable diUerences of perceived complexity based on theoretical variability and predictability, with a large eUect of movement variability. In a second study, the aesthetic consequences of these organizational choices were explored. To this aim, eye tracking data and continuous ratings were collected and compared to the previously collected complexity ratings. To extract valuable information from the viewing data, the recently developed Taxonomy for Viewing in Dance (TaViDa) was used. Preliminary analyses reveal a positive correlation between choreographic complexity and aesthetic appreciation. For example, moments of prolonged repetition seem to induce boredom, while a sudden change in one of the choreographic levels often increases appreciation. At the same time, these eUects are expected to be accompanied by diUerences in viewing behavior. Performed analyses have shown that viewing behavior is dependent on perceived complexity, coming analyses will explore if this also results in aesthetic diUerences. Both approaches will be discussed in the context of the observer, as well as the performance. The first refers to individual diUerences such as expertise, the second to the physical context. Both recordings, as well as live performances were employed, facilitating a direct comparison.
3
Interacting bodies in dance: How visuospatial relations shape aesthetic, emotional, and semantic evaluations
Dance provides a powerful medium for studying how our brain perceives and evaluates bodies in motion. While much neuroscientific research has focused on single bodies, only recently has attention shifted toward interactions between individuals. From a cognitive neuroscience perspective, two features of interacting bodies have received particular attention: body positioning and synchrony, which seem to facilitate the perception of those bodies as a coherent unit. From a choreographic perspective, however, a wide range of visuospatial features has been explored and intentionally used to shape audience engagement, many of which remain largely unexamined in scientific research. Bringing these perspectives together raises a fundamental question: what combination of visuospatial features of two dancing bodies possibly shapes their aesthetic, emotional, and semantic evaluation? To answer this, we recorded the motion kinematics of a pair of dancers engaged in a visuospatial task and transferred these movements onto 3D avatars. We generated a series of images depicting dyadic body postures that varied along multiple visuospatial dimensions, including shared interpersonal space, centre-of-mass distance, orientation, use of vertical space, and symmetry. Across four studies, 200 participants evaluated these images in terms of aesthetic pleasure, interest, symmetry, emotional valence, and meaning. DiUerent statistical approaches were used to examine how each visuospatial features contributed to these five evaluation dimensions. In particular, aesthetic appreciation seemed to depend on a mosaic of features, with a central role for the extent to which bodies share interpersonal space, which we term “entanglement”. Interactions characterized by greater entanglement are consistently perceived as more aesthetically pleasing, more interesting to watch, and more meaningful than less entangled configurations. Taken together, these findings suggest that knowledge from dance and choreography can inform the neuroscientific study of interacting bodies and social cognition, possibly beyond the dance context.
4
Audience gaze reflects felt social connection to individual performers during live dance
In everyday social interactions, gaze behaviour reflects interpersonal relationships and social engagement. We investigated how social connection shapes audience engagement by commissioning a live durational dance performance called How Shall We Begin Again? initiated by artist Jo Fong. The performance lasted 16 hours across two days and consisted of a relay of improvised performances by a total of 50 diUerent people. Each individual performance including sections with and without music. Audience members rated their felt social connection, focus, and prior familiarity with each performer that they saw and described their engagement in answers to open questions. We examined how these social and attentional factors related to gaze behaviour and neural dynamics, using a computer-vision deep learning model to analyse eye-tracking data alongside exploratory analyses of EEG power and inter-brain synchrony. We found a positive relationship between felt social connection, gaze behaviour, and engagement, which was mediated by selfreported focus on individual performers. At the neural level, dancing with music was associated with decreased EEG alpha power and increased delta power, consistent with heightened attentional and aUective engagement. Together, these findings suggest that engagement with live dance emerges from interactions between social connection, attention, and shared contextual cues. Engagement with dance depends not only on the dance that is being performed but also on the dancer that is performing, and the social context in which the performance unfolds.
5
Embodied perception of dance: a journey from aesthetic preference to emotion processing
6
Recreating dances in air from drawings on land
‘It’s a Draw’ is a series of drawings with dynamic curls, loops, twists, spirals and vortices, made by Trisha Brown the maverick postmodern dancer while pivoting, rolling and skidding in a freewheeling dance across large-scale paper with charcoal and pastel held by hands and feet. The drawings were not preplanned to represent anything figurative or abstract, they are pure vestiges of improvised actions. Video documentation reveals the movements that generated the marks on the ground which raises the question whether the kinetic nature of the marks is suUicient to decode the movements, or whether decoding requires aids to visualization. Sikkema Malloy Jenkins Gallery kindly provided digital versions of 44 drawings and 2 videos, which enabled us to categorize the drawing movements in the videos. The categorization provides ground-truths for decoding movements from the drawings generated in the videos, and the categories enable us to systematically study the ability of observers to decode a drawing without viewing the generating video. Using the supplied movement categories, four groups of observers were asked to identify the movements that generated specific extended marks, some ambiguous but others resembling silhouettes. Groups 1&2 saw the drawing generated by one or the other of the two videos after seeing the other video of Brown making a drawing, providing models for potentially visualizing complete movements. Control groups 3&4 were restricted to perceptual cues as each saw only one of the same drawings and read a general description of the movements with which they were made. The original drawings are many meters across. Scaled down presentations on a large monitor make it harder to identify the movements generating silhouettes as tracing real limbs, but comparisons between the groups on accuracy of identifying movement categories can reveal how perception guided visualization enables interpretation of art with a kinetic motor component. For a repository of the drawings and the videos https://privateviews.artlogic.net/2/2126340ba3cf9b45dd6b6d/
Symposium 4: Accessibility Enhancement to Visual Arts & Science by Technology
11:00–12:30 Saturday August 22, 2026
Chia-huei Tseng1, Asaf Bachrach2, & Xiyue Wang3
1Research Institute of Electrical Communication, Tohoku University, Japan, 2UMR 7023, CNRS, Paris, France, 3Miraikan – The National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation, Tokyo, Japan
Access to arts is a basic human right. In this symposium, we want to showcase examples of how modern technology overcomes the barriers for diverse individuals to access paintings, ikebana (Japanese floral arrangement), joint contact improvisation, and museum visits. In return, we want to argue that all visitors, including those with visual impairments, younger or older adults, foreigners without local language skills or cultural background, and those with neurodivergent needs, all have a role in creating the art experiences and contribute to our understanding of how the physical world interacts with our visual and other sensory systems.
1
Color and Blindness: Investigation, Development, and Application of Haptic Color System
In the field of Human-Computer Interaction, HCI, and Sensory Substitution, transmitting high-bandwidth visual information, such as color spectrum, through the lower-bandwidth tactile channel remains a significant engineering challenge. This lecture presents the “Haptic Color Wheel (HCW),” a sensory coding system designed to encode visual chromatic data into tactile signals for the visually impaired., Dr. Chao will discuss the system’s development from an information theory perspective, detailing how semantic visual attributes, Hue, Saturation, Value, are mapped onto tactile parameters, Geometry, Texture Density, Size, . The session will cover the signal design process, analyzing the trade-offs between “associative intuition” and “tactile spatial resolution.” Furthermore, empirical data from psychophysical experiments with blind subjects will be presented to evaluate the system’s learning efficiency and information transfer rate, proposing a new model for multimodal interface design.
2
HanaARrange: Designing An Augmented Reality Support System for Daily Ikebana Practice and Well-being
Ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement, offers practitioners significant mental health benefits, yet daily practice is often limited by a lack of guidance and resource constraints. This work explores using augmented reality (AR) to address these accessibility challenges to enable ikebana self-practice. Based on a formative study interviewing 14 students and instructors on their ikebana experiences and challenges, we designed HanaARrange, an AR system providing structured guidance as users prepare their real-life ikebana arrangements. In a user study with 9 participants, we found that HanaARrange outperformed traditional self-practice in achieving correct basic ikebana forms, while offering comparable workload and mental well-being benefits. We then conducted iterative refinements with 6 more experienced learners, identifying recursive use patterns and future opportunities. Our system provides insights into supporting creative cultural heritage practices, expanding the ikebana ecosystem beyond traditional constraints of physical location and direct instruction, and enhancing mental well-being and life qualities.
3
Sticking with Speculation: Tactile Curiosity and Somatic Technologies in Contact Improvisation
In the context of enhancing accessibility to the arts, this presentation explores how a simple somatic technology—a stick utilized in a light-deprived environment—can profoundly modulate sensory attention and reshape our engagement with the physical world. Rooted in the movement practices of Contact Improvisation and the teachings of somatic pioneers like Steve Paxton and Lisa Nelson, we introduce a kinesthetic exercise in “diffractive speculation”. Drawing on physicist Niels Bohr’s 1929 thought experiment and feminist philosopher Karen Barad’s Agential Realism framework, we investigate how our physical engagement creates an “agential cut”. Bohr noted that holding a stick loosely makes it feel like an isolated object, whereas holding it firmly transforms it into an instrument, immediately shifting the sensation of touch to where the stick meets the external environment. Phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty similarly observed that through habit, such tools cease to be perceived as foreign objects and instead become bodily appendages used for perception. While historically framed through a normative ableist lens, disability studies scholars affirm that incorporating new instruments fundamentally alters our existence and dilates our being in the world. This tactile modulation of our attentional habits reveals the fluid edges between the perceiver, the apparatus, and the observed. We argue that curiosity is not merely a subjective cognitive trait located in the mind, but rather an ontological performance executed in and with the world. By exploring the inherent stickiness of hapticality, participants learn to carefully probe and caress their environment, embracing the world’s indeterminacy. Ultimately, this practice illustrates that all visitors—regardless of visual impairments or neurodivergent needs—actively co-become with their environment, utilizing adaptive sensory tools to meaningfully co-create accessible, multisensory art experiences.
4
Engaging People with Special Needs in Science Museums Through Immersive Workshops
Science museums offer multimedia exhibitions and themed workshops that combine visual arts, scientific concepts, and interactivity to foster informal learning and inspiration. However, their accessibility for people with disabilities remains underexplored. In this talk, Xiyue presents four years of research-through-design practice conducted by a cross-disciplinary team, including science communicators, museum staff, and accessibility researchers, with an aim to develop accessible workshops at Miraikan (the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation) in Tokyo, Japan. This work leverages hands-on science workshops as a platform for advancing inclusive design. She will introduce the design, development, and facilitation of multiple workshops, including (1) a tactile tour that enables visitors with visual impairments to experience life aboard the International Space Station, (2) a workshop exploring phenomena from the Earth’s interior to deep space, and (3) a visually enriched tour for deaf and hard-of-hearing visitors that uses text and illustrations to support engagement. Beyond these cases, the talk shares three key contributions: (1) a participatory and adaptive framework for accessible science workshop design; (2) practical accessibility guidelines for museum staff on training, co-development, and content planning; and (3) actions for applying emerging technologies to support flexible, social, and enjoyable science experiences for visually impaired visitors.
Talk sessions
Talk session 1: Ambiguity, Dynamism & Attention
12:00–13:00 Thursday August 20, 2026
1
Dynamism in Still Images: Perceptual Bases for the Power of Diagonals in Art and Design
Artists, photographers, and designers use diagonals to convey dynamism and instability in naturalistic and abstract images, creating a sense of drama and tension in their works. At the same time, the oblique effect in visual perception refers to a reduced sensitivity to oblique compared to cardinal (vertical/horizontal) orientations, linked to anisotropies in the distribution of preferred orientations of primary visual cortex neurons, which reflects the statistical distribution of edge orientations in images of natural scenes. Because diagonal structures generically project onto oblique orientations on the retina, this creates a striking contrast between their perceptual salience in art and their reduced sensitivity in vision. We conjectured that global spatial configurations could shape perceived dynamism beyond local orientation encoding. Inspired by Theo van Doesburg’s Arithmetical Composition (1929–1930), we created 60 distinct linear configurations of four identically-shaped rhombi each, in which global and local-edge orientations were independently manipulated to be cardinal or oblique, and measured their perceived dynamism with three complementary methods. First, in an online experiment, 250 observers rated oblique configurations as more dynamic, three-dimensional, and unstable than cardinal configurations, while local oblique orientations exerted a smaller effect on these qualities. Second, pairwise comparisons by 50 observers yielded a perceptual dynamism scale that strongly correlated with average ratings, confirming the dominant role of global configurations in shaping high-level perceptual outcomes. Third, pupillometry on 35 observers showed that pupil size varies systematically with subjective dynamism ratings, with larger dilations in response to configurations judged as more dynamic. The behavioral, psychophysical, and psychophysiological results together establish that perceived dynamism in static images is driven primarily by the orientation of the global spatial configuration and influenced less by orientations of local edges. By linking visual structure to affective perceptual experience, this investigation provides empirically grounded principles for creating dynamic percepts in art and design.
2
Does Spatial Ambiguity Contribute to Aesthetic Preference? Evidence from Op Art and Matched Control Stimuli
Op Art is often characterized by perceptual ambiguity, which is assumed to enhance aesthetic experience. However, the contribution of spatial ambiguity to aesthetic preference remains underexplored. Here, we investigated whether spatial ambiguity predicts aesthetic preference, testing the degree to which perceptual processing and aesthetic judgment can be dissociated. We conducted a two-phase experiment with N=51 participants using 61 stimuli: 29 Op Art images and 32 geometric shapes; stimuli were selected to contrast high levels of spatial ambiguity in Op Art with relatively unambiguous depth structure in geometric shapes. In Phase 1, each stimulus was presented for 1500 ms, after which participants indicated which of two markers superimposed on different parts of the image appeared closer in depth. Confidence ratings (1 - 7 Likert), reaction times (RTs), and inter-participant agreement on spatial judgements were recorded and the latter used as a behavioral index of spatial ambiguity. In Phase 2, the same images were presented again for 1500 ms, and participants rated their aesthetic preference (1 - 7 Likert). Spatial ambiguity strongly modulated perceptual measures: across all stimuli, lower inter-participant agreement was associated with lower confidence (r = .753, p < .001) and longer RTs (r = -.740, p < .001; all Bayes factors BF₁₀ ≫ 1). This pattern held within both Op Art and shape stimuli. However, ambiguity in spatial judgments did not predict aesthetic preference: the correlation between ambiguity and aesthetic ratings was negligible (r = .017, p = .896, BF₀₁ = 7.74). This absence of association was consistent across both stimulus categories. Our findings suggest that the effect of spatial ambiguity on aesthetic preference is weak under the present conditions, including stimulus selection and presentation timescales. Future studies will need to further investigate the degree to which the aesthetic impact of ambiguity depends on the time available for perceptual exploration and interpretation.
3
Neurodiverse Gaze: Autistic Traits, Attention, and Context Effects in Art Appreciation
Contemporary models of art appreciation (e.g., Leder, 2004; Bullot & Reber, 2013) describe it as a multi-stage process in which early sensory input feeds into higher-level evaluation. However, these accounts rely mainly on neurotypical data and may overlook differences associated with neurodivergence. Since aesthetic experience depends on both perception and meaning-making, a fuller account should consider how neurodiverse individuals, such as autistic people, engage with art. The current study addresses this gap by combining liking/understanding ratings with eye-tracking (total exploration time, ROI dwell time) in 45 participants. Using a 2 (Artwork type: portrait vs. non-portrait) × 3 (Contextual information: aesthetic, title, semantic) design, we tested how autistic traits (AQ) shaped these evaluative and oculomotor responses. Results show that liking ratings were lower for portraits than non-portraits and varied by context, but it was unrelated to autistic traits. Understanding ratings were strongly influenced by context, and semantic information improved understanding, especially for participants with higher autistic traits. Total exploration time showed no reliable effects of autistic traits or experimental factors. However, dwell time on ROIs, faces in portraits and salient regions in non-portraits, varied by artwork type and autistic traits: higher AQ predicted reduced attention to portrait ROIs, even after controlling for ROI size. Taken together, these findings show that autistic traits do not alter overall viewing duration, but they do shape how attention is allocated within images and how context supports understanding. While subjective liking appears relatively consistent across autistic traits, the way viewers use context to interpret art appears more variable. These results support more inclusive aesthetic models that account for diverse cognitive and perceptual styles.
4
I see aliens: How ambiguous stimuli in visual art can promote body image well-being
This paper presents an original, empirically grounded account of how visual art can improve body image well-being. In so doing, I show aesthetic experience to be a particularly effective forum for examining how visual perception engages body representation. Specifically, I argue that artworks mobilising visual representations of hybrid, human–animal, and ambiguous bodies can modulate appearance-related expectations, potentially decreasing body image dissatisfaction. I call such representations ‘alien bodies’ and understand them to include an invitation for spectators to imaginatively identify with these unfamiliar forms. My discussion centres on ‘Alien Embodiment Laboratory’ (AEL), an interdisciplinary workshop I have developed with cognitive neuroscientist Kirsten McKenzie, which deploys my own artwork and has been delivered to over 100 young people. The workshop combines a short introduction to the neuroscience of body image with two science-fiction-inflected artistic interventions: an experimental video and a participant drawing task. Our findings suggest improvements in participants’ body image well-being. The paper explains how these effects occur, focusing on the perceptual role of the artistic stimuli. Predictive processing (PP) provides the explanatory framework. In PP, perception is driven by expectation updating; well-being is supported when expectations remain revisable rather than becoming fixed. In the case of body image, dominant beauty norms can fix appearance-related priors, reducing their sensitivity to new perceptual evidence and contributing to persistent dissatisfaction. Recent work applying PP to aesthetics suggests that art’s structured ambiguity can sustain cycles of pleasurable updating, making it a plausible route to perceptual flexibility. The paper applies this logic to body image for the first time, specifying how alien bodies might activate and update appearance-related perceptions while also reframing higher-level concepts, promoting the revisability of appearance-related expectations and thereby reducing body image dissatisfaction.
Talk session 2: Colour, Light & Context
12:00–13:00 Thursday August 20, 2026
1
Knowing More, Seeing More: How Contextualising Information Impacts Gallery Visitors’ Art Perception in Three Studies
Artworks in museums are often presented with accompanying information, ostensibly to increase understanding—and therefore appreciation—of the artwork, the creator, and/or the larger context in which the artworks are situated. Though the research base supporting the efficacy of these practices is strong, fewer experimental studies have directly explored the impacts that information, specifically different kinds of information, have on the perceptual processes underlying art viewing and appreciation. Over several years, we have conducted three museum studies of art perception in which presenting participants with contextualising information was a critical variable. In each, we used a combination of mobile eye-tracking and questionnaires to assess participants’ engagement with, and appreciation of, artworks. Two studies conducted in Belgium, hosted at the BAC Art Lab and at KADOC, featured artworks from contemporary Flemish artists. Participants viewed the artworks in the exhibition before and after watching video interviews from these artists, in which they explained their techniques, intentions, and creative processes. In both studies, promoting participants to engage with the material qualities of the artworks heighten appraisals of those works. In the third study, conducted at the Manchester Art Gallery in England, we manipulated both the content (art historical or visual thinking) and the format (live tour or audio guide) of the information presented while participants engaged in slow-looking at still-life artworks. The presence of guiding information heightened aesthetic appraisals of the artworks, while visual thinking content specifically promoted visual exploration. This talk presents an overview of the common findings from these studies, as well as the specific caveats and limitations of each, in a synthesis of our work on the role of informational context on visitors art perception (eye gaze and exhibition navigation behaviours) and appreciation (aesthetic and emotional responses to the artworks).
2
The empirical aesthetics of fashion: When visual context shapes clothing preferences, and when it does not
Previous research in the psychology of fashion has examined individual factors that predict preferences for particular garments, including personality (e.g., the Big Five), demographic variables (e.g., age and gender), and national culture (e.g., the UK vs. the USA; Hur et al., 2023, 2025). However, because fashion is multifaceted, clothing preferences may also be shaped by contextual factors. In this talk, I report on two types of visual context (both works are currently under review): the attractiveness of a garment’s wearer (the “model effect”) and prior visual exposure. With respect to the “model effect”, I report three studies demonstrating that attractive wearers/models consistently increase positive evaluations of dresses. This effect was robust, emerging both when participants were explicitly instructed to evaluate the dress itself (Study 2; N = 180) and when they evaluated the image as a whole (Study 1; N = 54), as well as across both experimental (Studies 1 and 2) and naturalistic settings (Study 3; N = 30). With respect to prior visual exposure, I report three experimental studies (Ns = 172, 162, and 183) in which participants were repeatedly exposed to boiler suits, dresses, and coats, while exposure frequency, task instructions, and stimulus presentation were systematically manipulated. The findings, supported by a meta-analysis, indicated that prior exposure alone did not reliably increase preference for a particular garment. Instead, increases in preference through exposure emerged only when viewers experienced positive affective responses during exposure. In line with previous research, stable individual differences (e.g., age, gender, and personality) robustly predicted baseline preferences. Taken together, these findings highlight the multiple factors that underpin everyday clothing preferences and suggest that contextual influences on fashion evaluation are selective rather than universal. The talk will also discuss broader questions concerning the place of fashion psychology within experimental psychology and empirical aesthetics.
3
Effects of coloured lighting on perceived atmosphere in photographs and paintings
Artists, architects and lighting technicians have been carefully curated coloured lighting to create and shape the atmosphere of scenes and artworks. In this context, the lighting colours have often been chosen by intuition or rules of thumb handed down within a profession. In a series of studies, we investigated whether the effects of colour on atmosphere are reliable and whether they depend on other properties of visual artwork. We compared lighting effects in photos and paintings of various content. While manipulations of lighting colour affect the perceived illumination of the spaces depicted in photos, their effects may be more complicated in figurative and abstract paintings, where it is ambiguous whether colour variation result from physical lighting conditions or artistic manipulations. Fifteen atmosphere descriptors (e.g., “cosy”) were investigated, and observers could choose the scene under one of five colours (neutral, red, yellow, green, blue) to best match the atmosphere. Similarities were found across the various photos, figurative and abstract paintings, indicating a systematic effect of the lighting colour on the perceived atmosphere independent of picture content and format. In line with professional practices, atmospheres varied most strongly and consistently between warm (yellow, red) and cool (blue, neutral) colours. However, there were also systematic differences across photos and paintings. For example, tense atmospheres (scary, hostile, threatening) were perceived most often under green light in photos, but rather under red light in paintings. In addition, a cross-cultural comparison revealed that similar effects of colour lighting on atmospheres in English and Chinese observers. The systematic lighting effects on atmosphere allowed us to generate a colour-based atmosphere space that can guide manipulations of perceived atmosphere through coloured lighting in design, architecture, and artistic practice.
4
A metric of color space for science, art, and technology
Color space is commonly treated as three-dimensional, yet its perceptual structure remains poorly defined. Existing empirical evidence is largely based on local measurements of small color differences, such as MacAdam ellipses, which provide only fragmentary constraints on perceptual spacing. As a result, widely used color systems in science, design, and technology rely either on extrapolations from sparse data or on heuristic, qualitatively uniform palettes. Here we present a direct empirical determination of a perceptual metric field across the RGB color space. Observers adjusted colors until they appeared notably, qualitatively different from a fixed reference. Thirty-five reference colors, arranged on a body-centered cubic lattice, sampled the space. For each reference, perceptual differences were measured along multiple directions, yielding local ellipsoids that characterize the geometry of color differences. The resulting metric field reveals a coherent and shared structure across observers. While absolute scale varies with individual criteria, the shapes and orientations of the local metrics show strong agreement. When integrated across the space, this structure suggests that perceptual color space is far coarser than commonly assumed, comprising on the order of a few hundred distinct colors. Beyond its relevance for vision science, this work provides a bridge to artistic and design practice. By making the perceptual metric explicit, it offers a principled basis for constructing color palettes, controlling contrast, and navigating color space in a way that aligns with human experience. More broadly, it demonstrates that high-dimensional perceptual spaces can be mapped empirically, opening new possibilities for perceptually grounded design and visualization in complex technological environments.
Talk session 3: Composition & Expertise
13:30–14:30 Friday August 21, 2026
1
Modelling Visual Composition in Art and Photography
Understanding visual composition is a fundamental challenge at the intersection of computer vision and visual perception. Existing computational models for composition analysis are known to be heavily biased toward semantic content, limiting their ability to capture genuine compositional structure. The recent release of large-scale datasets for composition category and score prediction now makes it possible to investigate whether fine-tuning foundation models on sufficient data can overcome this semantic bias. We compare two fundamentally different approaches to composition understanding. The first fine-tunes large self-supervised foundation models directly on composition tasks. The second takes a human-inspired approach grounded in perceptual grouping: we use object-centric learning to decompose scenes into meaningful region-level representations, and model the relationships between these regions using a graph attention network. This design mirrors the hierarchical nature of human visual perception, from region segmentation to relational reasoning, while remaining highly parameter-efficient. Our results reveal a data-dependent trade-off: when sufficient labeled data is available, fine-tuned foundation models can overcome semantic bias and outperform human-inspired architectures. However, our human-inspired framework offers a key advantage that foundation models cannot provide: interpretability. By explicitly modeling inter-region relationships, our approach produces a structured graph representation that reveals which regions drive composition understanding, and enables visual saliency detection without any additional supervision or task-specific architecture. The same compositional embedding also supports compositional image retrieval, demonstrating its versatility across downstream tasks. We further discuss the specific challenges of learning composition in artwork, where a single global aesthetic score is too general to fully supervise compositional learning. We argue that composition category labels or descriptive annotations are more effective supervision signals, and present evidence supporting this hypothesis. Our findings offer both practical insights for computational aesthetics and theoretical implications for models of human visual perception.
2
How Expertise Affects the Creation and Evaluation of Artistic Compositions: The Role of Symmetry
This study investigates how symmetry—a visual property known to facilitate processing fluency—shapes the creation and evaluation of artistic compositions across expertise levels, extending our previous findings on expertise effects in creative assessment (Author, 2024). In a two-phase experiment, experts and non-experts first created compositions aiming for creativity and beauty using five pairs of basic discs, and then a separate group of experts and non-experts evaluated the resulting images on both creativity and beauty dimensions. Results revealed that non-experts showed high inter-rater reliability, strong correlation between beauty and creative judgments, and clear preferences for symmetrical compositions and easily interpretable picture types. Experts, by contrast, exhibited low consensus, greater separation between creativity and beauty, and no group-level sensitivity to symmetry. However, individual-level analysis revealed their polarized preferences for symmetry rather than uniform indifference. Experts also showed a preference for moderate spatial complexity as reflected in an inverted-U relationship between proximity and expert creativity ratings. Experts’ creativity ratings were positively correlated with creators’ expertise levels, consistent with our previous findings. These results suggest that expertise shifts the cognitive basis of aesthetic and creative evaluation from fluency-driven processing, where symmetry and clustering facilitate immediate appeal, toward elaboration-driven processing that values moderate complexity and resists easy interpretation. The significant correlation between expert creativity ratings and creator expertise further indicates that domain knowledge provides a shared evaluative framework not captured by surface-level visual features. Together, expert creativity judgments reflect both an individual aesthetic preference layer and a shared quality-detection layer.
3
Aesthetic Experience Arises from Probabilistic Inference over Hierarchical Mental Representations
Why do certain visual scenes appear beautiful? We argue that aesthetic experience arises not from surface features, but from the mind’s active probabilistic inference of a hierarchical latent structure that best explains the observed image. Using Mondrian-style abstract compositions, we developed a hierarchical Bayesian model that generates images and recovers their hidden organization, which can be computed and quantified by two kinds of parameters. Across nine experiments with schematic and naturalistic stimuli, beauty ratings were best predicted by a generative model trained on human drawings. Moreover, we found that observers preferred images whose latent architecture matched human drawing priors, striking an optimal balance between predictability and novelty. A deeper implication is the integration of viewing and production. Because our generative model derives from how people actively construct images, it captures the same constraints governing both creation and evaluation. In our third section of experiments with human iterative message-passing” paradigm, we found that creators externalize internal structural priors during memory and recreation process, while viewers reconstruct those structures via perceptual inference. Therefore, we demonstrated that aesthetic appreciation emerges from the active inference of the latent hierarchical scene structure through the integration of subjective priors and objective visual stimuli, offering a computationally rigorous account of why some scenes move us more than others. In addition, we also tested the recent deep-learning AIs with the same aesthetic evaluation tasks, but they all failed to have similar judgement as human, which suggests that they need to internalize human-aligned, probabilistic constructive mechanisms to get closer to appreciation of beauty from human.
4
Neural Representations Underlying Hierarchical Structure in Composition
Aesthetic experience is shaped not only by what an image depicts, but also the way it is composed. The generative accounts propose that the visual system may interpret images by inferring latent hierarchical structures that best explain the observed scene. Using Mondrian-style abstract compositions, previous behavioral and computational work has suggested that observers possess stable subjective priors, including a parameter (γ) that controls the depth of the inferred latent hierarchical structures. The present study explored whether neural representations might reflect this proposed inferential principle during visual processing. Electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded while participants performed a change-detection task on Mondrian-style images. Following a hierarchical representational modeling approach, we estimated posterior probabilities over the latent hierarchical structures underlying each image and used these distributions to construct model representational dissimilarity matrices (RDMs). Neural RDMs were derived from EEG activity during the retention interval for each image and compared with model RDMs. We found that model–neural correspondence varied systematically as a function of the hierarchical prior parameter γ, with the strongest correspondence emerging in a parameter range consistent with previous behavioral findings. This pattern provides neural evidence that the visual system spontaneously processes hierarchically structured images through prior-guided generative inference. More broadly, this pattern is consistent with the view that compositional structure—central to many forms of aesthetic experience—is represented in the brain through hierarchical probabilistic organization.
Talk session 4: Aesthetic Experience, Emotion & the Body
13:30–14:30 Friday August 21, 2026
1
Arts Spaces as Models of Care: Feminist, Biometric design in Immersive Environments
Cultural and arts spaces are understood as sites of collective experience, but their potential as environments that actively support mental health and emotional wellbeing remains underexplored as a design intention. This talk argues that immersive arts environments have a distinctive capacity to function as sites of care, connection, and healing, and that interoception offers the perceptual mechanism through which that capacity can be cultivated. Interoceptive awareness, the ability to perceive and interpret internal bodily signals, is disrupted across virtually every mental health condition (Khalsa et al., 2018). Biometric and EEG technologies now make it possible to surface how people change in real time, offering audiences a reflective encounter with their own emotional and internal states. For immersive designers, the question is how to present that data. Dominant paradigms in consumer health technology tend toward certainty: a device that tells you that you are stressed, or that you slept poorly. This talk proposes an alternative grounded in feminist design values that prioritise personal interpretation and support multiple ways of knowing. Rather than delivering verdicts about the body, well-designed biometric experiences offer pluralistic, aesthetically rich data that audiences are invited to explore on their own terms. Two case studies illustrate this approach. Your Inner Symphony (Kinda Studios / Nexus Studios, Barbican Centre, 2025) translated visitors’ heart rate, heart rate variability, and galvanic skin response into evolving personalised visualisations, enabling reflection on how internal states shift across an aesthetic experience. EVE (EEG Visualiser of Emotions) maps real-time neural data to art using touchdesigner, rendering emotional states as dynamic artistic output, functioning as an interpretive mirror rather than a clinical instrument. Both projects are examined through the CARE framework (Ida XR Studio), a practitioner-oriented model evaluating Connection, Affect, Resonance, and Engagement, which positions this design approach as relational, non-prescriptive, and oriented toward participant agency. Arts spaces, this talk concludes, are uniquely positioned to model a more humane relationship between people and their biometric data, one which can support improved health and wellbeing. References; Khalsa, S. S., Adolphs, R., Cameron, O. G., Critchley,H. D., Davenport, P. W., Feinstein, J. S., Feusner, J. D., Garfinkel, S. N., Lane, R. D., Mehling, W. E., … Paulus, M.P. (2018). Interoception and mental health: A roadmap. Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, 3(6), 501–513. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bpsc.2017.12.004
2
The Cross-Cultural Validity of the Visual Aesthetic Sensitivity Test-Revised (VAST-R) Across Four Countries
The Visual Aesthetic Sensitivity Test (VAST; Götz et al., 1979, Perceptual and Motor Skills) is a forced-choice measure in which respondents select the more aesthetically pleasing composition from pairs of abstract paintings, with correct answers determined by expert consensus. Its revised version, the VAST-R (Myszkowski & Storme, 2017, British Journal of Psychology), retains 25 items with improved structural validity. Although an early cross-cultural comparison found minimal differences between English and Japanese samples on the original VAST (Iwawaki et al., 1979, Perceptual and Motor Skills), no study has examined the VAST-R across multiple cultures using modern psychometric methods. This study addressed this gap by reanalyzing data from a cross-cultural investigation of aesthetic responses to Ikebana (Japanese flower arrangement), conducted with 976 participants from Japan, Germany, the UK, and the US. Overall VAST-R scores differed significantly across countries with the US scoring lowest. Notably, Japan did not differ from the European samples. Most items showed low discrimination and high pass rates, resulting in modest internal consistency (KR-20: .57–.65) across all countries. Differential item functioning analysis identified several items with cross-cultural bias in both directions, not uniformly favoring Western participants. A unidimensional IRT model fit well in the Western samples (CFI ≥ .93) but poorly in Japan (CFI = .84). Metric measurement invariance was supported, whereas scalar invariance was not. To examine predictive validity, linear mixed models tested whether the effect of VAST on Ikebana ratings varied across countries. A significant interaction emerged for five of six aesthetic outcomes. VAST positively predicted liking in the Western samples but negatively in Japan, suggesting that Japanese individuals whose judgments align with Western expert standards may evaluate culturally familiar art more critically. These findings suggest that the VAST-R captures a cross-culturally recognizable construct, but its measurement properties and predictive meaning are not equivalent across cultures.
3
Artist–Viewer Emotional Alignment: Behavioral and Neural Evidence from an fNIRS Study in a Gallery–like Setting
When engaging with art, people often report feeling what the artist intended them to feel, or even the phenomenological states the artist experienced during the creative process. Yet the neural underpinnings of this emotional alignment, and the individual traits that shape it, remain under-investigated, particularly outside of laboratory settings. This talk presents preliminary behavioral and neuroimaging findings from a functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) study examining emotional resonance and shared meaning making between artists and viewers in an ecologically valid gallery setting. Participants viewed six original artworks and rated their phenomenological states following each interaction, their perceptions of what the artist intended them to feel, as well as other artwork appraisals. The artworks’ creators also each reported both the emotions they felt during the making of the piece and the emotions they intended to evoke in viewers. We relate artist-viewer emotional alignment to viewer neural activity measured using a 16-source/16-detector fNIRS setup in regions associated with emotion regulation, empathy, and theory of mind — including the medial prefrontal cortex, temporoparietal junction, inferior frontal gyrus, and posterior superior temporal sulcus. Trait empathy, imagination, and social connectedness were included as covariates to explore the dispositional factors that may facilitate or impede emotional resonance with artworks and their makers. Preliminary findings and their implications for the understanding of art as a medium of emotional communication will be discussed, as well as the potential of this work to offer a novel window into the neural dynamics underlying (shared) art experiences, (indirect) social interaction through art and the role of artist intent and felt emotion in aesthetics and real-world art engagement.
4
Reading from Body Motion: the role of cultural background in emotion recognition and expression
Humans communicate emotions not only through verbal interaction but also through bodily postures, gestures, and movements engaging the whole body (Hannah, 1979; de Gelder, 2006; Bachmann, Munzert, & Krüger, 2018). Past research has highlighted cultural differences in emotion recognition from body movement (e.g., Hall et al., 1996) and the need for culturally diverse bodily emotion databases, particularly to address the Western bias in existing resources. Accordingly, Cheng et al. (2025) developed DIEM-A, a database with Asian (Japanese) professional actors expressing seven basic emotions through adopting whole-body, motion-capture methods using a 57-marker system, creating point-light displays to isolate movement-based emotional expression. Current study selected 70 videos of the 18-marker point-light displays from DIEM-A to investigate the cross-cultural differences in interpreting Asian bodily emotions. In Experiment 1, we reported the first evidence of an in-group advantage in body emotional expression: Asian participants were faster, more accurate and confident in emotion recognition than non-Asian participants. The performance accuracy is positively correlated with participants’ contact with Asian culture, but not their individualistic tendencies, suggesting a more dominant role of cultural display rules than attitudes towards self and community. In Experiment 2, we recruited participants who had lived in the UK for at least 18 months, who had either East Asian or Western (Anglophone) backgrounds. Linear mixed-effects models showed that East Asians recognised emotions more accurately, particularly for identifying Joy, Anger, and Disgust. Confidence in their emotion recognition was primarily driven by individual differences (ICC = .71). Perceived arousal varied by the type of emotion, with Anger rated as most arousing. Valence ratings showed a significant Emotion × Group interaction: East Asians evaluated Joy and Surprise as more positive than Westerners, whereas Westerners rated Anger as relatively more positive. Performance accuracy was not related to contact with Asian culture, nor their individualistic tendencies. Additional analysis across the three cultural groups revealed that East Asians in the UK showed the highest overall recognition accuracy, followed by Asians living in Asia, with Westerners in the UK performing the lowest. These findings suggest that cultural familiarity with movement-based emotional expressions enhances recognition accuracy and highlight the importance of culturally diverse bodily emotion datasets for cross-cultural affective research.
Talk session 5: Designing Immersive & Interface Experiences
13:30–14:30 Saturday August 22, 2026
1
Aesthetic Evaluation as a Gate to Perception: Linking Perception, Attention, and Aesthetic Experience
Neuroaesthetic research has traditionally conceptualized aesthetic experience as emerging downstream of perceptual processing, with visual features first analysed and subsequently evaluated for their aesthetic value. Foundational frameworks have distinguished between perceptual (e.g., brightness) and aesthetic (e.g., beauty) judgements, suggesting partially separable neural systems underlying these processes. However, growing empirical evidence challenges this sequential account, suggesting a more dynamic, reciprocal relationship between perception and aesthetic evaluation. This paper synthesizes findings across behavioral and neuroimaging studies to argue that aesthetic valuation actively shapes perceptual processing rather than merely following it. Three converging lines of research support this claim: (1) aesthetically preferred stimuli are more likely to gain access to conscious awareness under conditions of limited or competing input, (2) aesthetic features such as style and contextual framing influence the temporal dynamics of perceptual processing, and (3) aesthetic experience modulates attention and cognitive prioritization. Together, these findings suggest that aesthetic evaluation operates early and continuously within perceptual systems. Building on this synthesis, we introduce an “aesthetic gating” framework, in which the brain selectively filters and prioritizes incoming sensory information based on aesthetic value. Within this model, aesthetic and perceptual processes are not strictly hierarchical, but interact dynamically to determine what is perceived, attended to, and consciously experienced. By reframing aesthetic experience as an integral component of perception rather than its endpoint, this work has implications beyond neuroaesthetics, informing the design of visual interfaces, human–computer interaction, and emerging technologies that rely on perceptual prioritization. Understanding how aesthetic value guides attention and awareness may contribute to more intuitive, adaptive, and human-centered design across artistic and technological domains.
2
Foregrounding Curvature: Artists and Scientists Rethink Architectural Experience
We here present an interdisciplinary project at the intersection of architecture, psychology, and neuroaesthetics that uses curvature as a test case for rethinking how artists and scientists study spatial experience. Empirical work on “neuroarchitecture” has often relied on static, decontextualized images and narrow tasks, raising concerns among architects that experimental control comes at the cost of architectural meaning, embodied engagement, and design logic. Our project responds by treating architectural design not only as the object of study but also as a methodological engine for constructing richer experimental worlds. We began by developing an architect-designed corpus of interior spaces in which foreground and background elements could be systematically recomposed into curvilinear and angular configurations under tightly controlled rendering conditions. These stimuli preserve spatial hierarchy, figure–ground relations, and cues for bodily engagement while allowing scientific manipulation. Using this corpus, a first study asked participants to evaluate the interiors on liking, beauty, fascination, coherence, hominess, emotional response, privateness, and willingness to spend time. Curved interiors received higher ratings on most experiential dimensions, particularly when curvature appeared in the foreground rather than only in the background. A second study used psychophysical methods to quantify how foreground and background curvature jointly determine perceived curvature. By morphing architectural scenes along controlled curvature continua and fitting psychometric functions, we found that foreground curvature accounts for approximately 80% and background curvature for about 20% of overall curvature perception, with these weights accurately predicting judgments when both are varied together. Taken together, these studies, embedded in a design-integrated framework that extends from images to prototypes and full-scale installations, demonstrate how collaboration between architects and scientists can produce nuanced empirical findings and actionable design knowledge. The talk argues that such practice-driven research paradigms are essential for a meaningful art–science dialogue about how built environments shape feeling and behavior.
3
Reaching the Unreachable: How vision pushes the boundaries of physicality in art, fashion and design
Visual technologies increasingly make distant things feel physically close: bodies encountered through video, garments assessed online, materials inferred from moving images, designed objects experienced before direct interaction. Here, vision does more than provide information. It intensifies proximity, suggests material qualities, activates bodily resonance, shapes whether something feels present, desirable, uncomfortable, or actionable. The conversation asks how vision stretches physicality across art, fashion, and design. Mariana Malta’s performance-based videos approach this question through the body. Her work stages intimate, vulnerable, constrained situations in which the screen does not provide distance or safety, but produces uneasy closeness. The viewer remains physically separate from the performed situation, yet may feel drawn in, unsettled, repelled, or held in affective tension. Vision here becomes a way of encountering bodily intensity without direct participation. Marella Campagna connects this artistic perspective to research on material perception in online fashion retail. In digital commerce, garments are visible and commercially available, but their tactile qualities cannot be directly explored. Softness, texture, and weight must be inferred from what is seen. Her work examines how dynamic visual presentations of material exploration can support these inferences, allowing motion to partly compensate for absence touch. Claus-Christian Carbon (CCC) extends this discussion through empirical aesthetics and design psychology. Drawing on his work on holistic product experience, haptic, multisensory aesthetics, and the dynamic evaluation of innovative art and designs, he argues that the unreachable is not only a deficit of missing touch. It can become an active psychological condition in which vision recruits bodily memory, anticipates material consequences, and transforms absent contact into expectation, elaboration, and insight. In this sense, art and science meet as complementary ways of making these processes observable and discussable. Moving across performance art, fashion, design, and psychology, the session asks how images make absent physicality feel present.
4
From Usability to Trust: Mapping the Evolution of Visual Interface Design in Digital Depression Interventions
As digital intervention technologies mature, digital formats such as web-based platforms, mobile applications, chatbots, virtual avatars, and digital humans have become important forms of mental health support for depression. Existing research has mainly examined their clinical effectiveness, adherence, and usability. However, less attention has been paid to how interface design shapes users’ visual attention, trust, and emotional engagement. For users with depressive symptoms, colour, layout, visual complexity, anthropomorphic representation, information hierarchy, and interactive feedback may influence how they understand therapeutic content, judge system credibility, and decide whether to continue using an intervention. This scoping review examines how interface design concerns in digital depression interventions have evolved over time and how visual and interactive features influence users’ attention, trust, and emotional engagement. To address these questions, we conducted a scoping review and design-oriented thematic synthesis of representative studies on web-based interventions, mobile mental health applications, chatbots, conversational agents, and digital humans. Preliminary findings suggest five interrelated shifts. First, interfaces have moved from text-based web modules towards mobile self-management interfaces embedded in everyday life. Second, evaluation has expanded from general usability to cognitive accessibility, including whether interfaces reduce information overload and support understanding. Third, conversational agents have shifted interfaces from static information delivery to dialogue-based interaction, moving trust from therapeutic content to the interaction process. Fourth, privacy notices, data explanations, and consent interfaces have become key design elements, extending trust towards transparency and ethical accountability. Fifth, avatars and digital humans have introduced embodied and anthropomorphic interfaces, where appearance, realism, cultural fit, and emotional feedback shape relational trust and emotional engagement. The review also identifies a methodological gap: although eye-tracking has been used in depression-related assessment and detection, its role in explaining how users with depressive symptoms visually attend to, evaluate, and trust digital intervention interfaces remains underexplored.
Talk session 6: Generative AI: Perception, Aesthetics & Creative
13:30–14:30 Saturday August 22, 2026
1
Revisiting ‘The Most Wanted Painting’: When AI Art Is Preferred Over Human Creations
Artworks have traditionally been understood as expressions of unique human capabilities such as intentionality and creativity. The emergence of AI-generated art has challenged these assumption, hence previous studies revealed a bias against AI-generated art. However, these studies have largely relied on authorship manipulations: they presented artworks made by human artists, or AI-generated artworks heavily inspired by famous human artists, as either human- or AI-generated. However, if, as experts suggest, AI-generated art is to differ significantly from human-created art, the generalisability of these previous findings, which essentially presented only “traditional”-looking human-created art is limited. To address this, we revisited Komar and Melamid’s People’s Choice project, which derived “Most Wanted” and “Least Wanted” paintings based on cross-cultural data. Using the same parameter structure, we generated new “Most Wanted” paintings with two current AI systems: Dall-e and NightCafe. This approach enabled controlled comparison across human- and AI-generated artworks while allowing generative variability within each system. Participants (N=210) evaluated the artworks and indicated perceived authorship, reliably distinguishing between human- and AI-generated paintings. Despite this, AI-generated artworks received higher ratings of beauty and interest than both the human-created “Most Wanted” and “Least Wanted” paintings. Additionally, a consistent preference emerged for Dall-e over NightCafe outputs. The results show that when AI generators are given creative “freedom”, they may generate artworks that are preferable over those made human artists, even if viewers correctly recognise the lack of human intentionality and creativity in these artworks. This suggests that human artists may not be “immune” to future competition with AI-generated art, which might bear significant consequences to the way humans create and appreciate art.
2
Human observers and AI observers of a rotating motion illusions are fooled by different things
Human perception and action demonstrate an impressive level of performance when detecting, identifying and interacting with moving objects around us. Perceptual performance has recently been emulated by popular LLM’s like Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and others. One surprising, but ubiquitous property of human vision is susceptibility to illusions. In this work, we measure factors contributing to the perceived strength of an illusion and then test whether susceptibilities are replicated in AI interpretations of the image sequences. The illusion in question is a rotating wheel illusion where a rotating display with four radial sections, two dark and two light in a doughnut like configuration with narrow high contrast edges on the inner and outer circumferences is seen to expand or contract despite no radial motion. This illusion was previously explored by an artist on social media (@jagarikin on X) but has not been studied empirically. We used a 2AFC psychophysical paradigm in which a reference mid-strength illusion was compared to a stimulus set in which the size and contrast of edge properties, speed and contrast of wheel properties and external contextual arrows were manipulated. All participants reported that they saw the illusion and by percentage, changes in speed generated the largest shifts in illusion strength, with edge size showing the smallest measurable effects. The contextual influence of adding a static arrow suggestive of motion enhanced or reduced the percept depending on the individual. In a follow up study, we converted a subset of the stimuli into videos and prompted the AI chatbots to judge the motion. Our AI companions were unable to consistently report the illusory motion under any condition. We discuss the range of responses received from AI, contrasting them with the specific hierarchical characteristics of natural vision that make it susceptible to radial and contextual illusions.
3
Aesthetic Experiences of Human-AI Co-Created Visual Artworks [Talk]
While AI tools continue to evolve and are increasingly incorporated in creative domains, humans are becoming less accurate in distinguishing AI-generated outputs from those generated by humans. AI involvement poses problems with originality, authenticity, and the recognition of the creative value of these outputs. Therefore, it becomes important to gain insights into the impact of human-AI interaction on the viewers’ experiences of human-AI co-created outputs. In this research, we go beyond the human-in-the-loop and human-out-of-the-loop dichotomy and focus on varying degrees of human-AI interaction. We aim to understand 1) whether humans attune differently towards the outputs that are co-created by humans and AI and the ones that are created by humans alone, and 2) whether the levels of involvement regarding the co-creative process affect the experience of those outputs. In order to understand the impact of interaction on experience, we distinguish between three levels of human-AI collaboration in creating visual art: minimal, where the output is generated via only a prompt; moderate, where the output is generated and refined with AI; and high, where the output is generated with extensive interaction with AI. We integrate behavioral methods, self-reports, and qualitative evaluations to explore the viewers’ experiences of outputs created under these interaction levels in contrast with outputs created by humans without any AI involvement. The multiple dimensions of aesthetic experience are examined via visual attention, perceived beauty, and emotional valence, as well as the detectability of AI involvement. The results indicate nuanced differences in aesthetic experience and AI involvement across interaction levels, while the qualitative evaluations show that the experiences may rely on subjective, perceptual, and interpretative cues. This study provides insights into how different degrees of human-AI interaction influence the perception of co-created outputs, contributing to the growing literature on developing human-centred AI systems.
4
From Climate Data to Ecological Perception: A Generative AI Visual Interface Driven by Real-Time Environmental Data
In climate communication and environmental display, data such as temperature, humidity, wind speed, illumination, air pressure, and airborne particulate matter are commonly presented as numbers, charts, or dashboards. While these formats provide accurate information, they often make it difficult for viewers to intuitively perceive the relationship between environmental conditions and living processes. This paper proposes a generative AI visual interface driven by real-time environmental data, using the digital art installation Climate Relics: Natural Archaeology in the Data Age as a design prototype. It explores how generative AI can translate abstract climate indicators into perceptible and continuously evolving ecological experiences. The prototype consists of three components: real-time environmental data, ecological form generation, and sample archive display. The system continuously collects local environmental information and converts it into visual generative parameters such as structural orientation, luminous intensity, and atmospheric erosion. Based on these parameters, generative AI produces ecological structures whose forms continuously evolve on screen through processes of growth, mutation, and decay. The main screen presents a dynamic ecological landscape, while the side screens display data changes, form inference processes, and sample archives. Together, they constitute a visual observation system oriented toward future ecologies. The focus of this paper is to extract from the prototype a perception-driven method for generative AI creation. First, it begins with environmental relationships that viewers find difficult to perceive directly, defining the perceptual problems that need to be translated. Second, climate data are mapped onto visual variables such as form, motion, materiality, rhythm, and spatial atmosphere. Third, generative AI organizes these variables into ecological forms with a sense of vitality and temporality. Finally, through archival display and interactive viewing, the interface enables viewers to establish perceptual associations with environmental change through aesthetic experience. This study argues that generative AI can serve not only as a tool for image generation, but also as a methodological tool for perceptual organization, aesthetic translation, and environmental communication. It offers a transferable prototype method for perception-driven artistic creation and interface design in relation to climate communication, sustainability, and public space display.
Poster sessions
Poster session 1: Empirical Aesthetics & Perception
11:30–14:00 Thursday August 20, 2026
1
Caught in the act: exploring emotion recognition through facial expressions, captured bodily gestures, and painted traces
Emotion perception has been extensively studied using biologically salient stimuli such as facial expressions, yet less is known about how it persists when transmitted through an expressive act. We investigated whether intended emotional content remains recognizable from painted traces and from kinematic-only representations of the gestures that produced them. One hundred adults completed an online within-subject experiment via Testable. Stimuli included standardized facial expressions from the Radboud Faces Database, motion-captured videos of upper limb movements of a trained artist, and the corresponding paintings created during those movements. The artist’s kinematics were recorded using VICON motion capture system while they produced paintings under the instruction to express anger, sadness, and joy through gestural execution (within 90 seconds each). Participants rated how strongly each stimulus conveyed the Ekman seven basic emotions on a continuous scales (1-10). Emotional discrimination was indexed as the difference between ratings for the intended target emotion and ratings for non-target emotions. Facial expressions yielded robust recognition (69.6% classification accuracy), with a mean difference of 5.06 points between target (M = 5.93) and non-target ratings (M = 0.87; p<.001). Emotional discrimination was observed across experimental modalities: painted traces showed a larger mean difference (4.06) than movement videos (2.21), with a significant Target × Modality interaction (p< .001). Cross-modal analyses revealed strong correspondence, particularly for anger and joy, whereas sadness showed weaker patterns. At the individual level, correlations were strongest for anger (r = .42, p< .001), moderate for joy (r = .29, p = .004), and not reliable for sadness. These findings suggest that emotion-related information can remain recognizable when expressive actions are transformed into images, supporting action-based frameworks of emotion perception. The results support the view that emotion perception may rely on action-related visual cues beyond facial expressions, while also indicating that this cross-modal correspondence differs across emotion categories.
2
Drawing Space Without Vision: Cross-Cultural Evidence for Region- and Vantage-Point-Based Representation in Tactile Line Drawings
Research on drawing by blind individuals has often focused on whether tactile graphics can be produced or recognized. Less attention has been given to how blind participants organize spatial structure through line-based representation. This study examines tactile line drawings produced by blind participants from Taiwan, Japan, and Italy in order to investigate how non-visual drawing encodes spatial relationships, object structure, and internal regions. Participants were asked to produce raised-line drawings of four objects with different geometric properties: an apple with a pin, a cube, a pizza, and a wheel. The drawings were analyzed using a developmental coding scheme focusing on representational strategies such as contour depiction, penetration or insertion lines, surface aggregation, region segmentation, and radial structural organization. The analysis is informed by three theoretical perspectives: Willats’ region theory of pictorial representation, the vantage-point hypothesis in drawing development, and sensorimotor accounts of perception emphasizing haptic exploration. Preliminary results suggest that object geometry strongly constrains representational strategies in non-visual drawing. Apples tended to elicit contour-based or penetration representations, cubes often induced surface-structured configurations, while pizzas and wheels more frequently revealed region-based segmentation and radial internal organization. These patterns were observed across participants from different cultural contexts, suggesting that tactile drawing strategies may reflect general principles of spatial cognition rather than culturally learned visual conventions. The findings indicate that lines in tactile drawing do not merely represent outer boundaries but can encode volumetric inclusion, internal segmentation, and structural relations. Non-visual drawing therefore provides a valuable experimental window into how spatial representations can emerge from haptic perception and action.
3
Putting William Hogarth’s claim to the test: How universal is his “Line of Beauty”?
Whether in art, architecture, fashion, or design, curved lines have fascinated humanity since antiquity. A theoretical milestone in this respect is the treatise “The Analysis of Beauty” (1753) by the British artist and theorist William Hogarth (1697–1764). In this work, Hogarth postulated not only that S-shaped curves are inherently aesthetic but also that a specific line among seven displayed curves of varying degrees of curvature—which he termed the “Line of Beauty” (LoB)—was the most beautiful of all. After more than 250 years, this claim has recently been largely confirmed empirically, mainly based on averaged beauty scores (Hübner & Ufken, 2022). However, in a selection task, fewer than a quarter of the participants preferred the LoB. This suggests that preferences for S-shaped lines are neither arbitrary nor universal. Therefore, we investigated the possibility of distinct group preferences. We asked 255 participants to evaluate the seven Hogarth lines according to their beauty. While the mean results are similar to the previous study, a cluster analysis identified four groups with diverging preference profiles. One group generally rated the beauty of the lines as relatively low, while another rated them relatively high. Nevertheless, both showed a slight bias toward the LoB. In contrast, participants in a third group preferred lines with relatively high curvature over those with low curvature, whereas a fourth group exhibited the opposite pattern. Notably, these latter two groups showed little to no specific preference for the LoB. However, when averaged, their contrasting profiles result in an artificial advantage for the LoB that is even greater than that observed in the other two groups. Together, these findings demonstrate the existence of subgroups with partially contradictory curvature preferences. Averaging their ratings may lead to an overestimation and overgeneralization of the perceived beauty of the LoB.
4
Being K. Malevich II: Color, Balance, Dynamic and Liking in self-arranged Suprematist Compositions
What makes a composition interesting? With shape elements of Suprematist artworks we examined how color, compositional tasks and individual preferences modified self-arranged compositions and aesthetic judgments of stability, dynamics and attractiveness. For ten Suprematist artworks we prepared two sets of paper stimuli of shape elements and backgrounds: one preserving the original color palette and an achromatic one with black shapes and white backgrounds. For each set twenty participants created a stable, dynamic, and an interesting composition (yielding 30 per person) by arranging first the paper cutouts before transferring them to the computer. Then participants rated their own compositions and the originals on balance, stability, dynamism, liking, and interest. Achromatic compositions and ratings were done two weeks before the chromatic ones. In the analysis, composition layouts were characterized with quantitative descriptors of symmetry, mass distribution, spatial dispersion and angular deviation from cardinal axes. Results of production: Shapes of stable compositions were often “stacked” symmetrically toward the lower pictorial field. In dynamic compositions they showed larger angular deviations and a wider spatial spread. In “interesting” compositions they exhibited greater diversity in orientation and position; with colored shapes deviations were slightly larger. Results of ratings: Color enhanced the perception of balance in stable arrangements, amplified dynamism in originals and self-arranged dynamic compositions, but had no effect on stability. “Interesting” compositions were liked most and judged as most balanced, here color increased liking and interestingness. We conclude that perceived attractiveness and liking depend on the task, number of shapes, structural variety in orientation and placement and shape colors act primarily as an affective amplifier for dynamics, balance and liking. Our work demonstrates the value of participatory construction paradigms combined with individual preference ratings with respect to the principles of perceptual organization of artworks.
5
The Influence of Emotional Experience on the Aesthetic Appreciation of Artworks with Horror Themes
This study aims to explore the influence of aesthetic emotions—including negative emotions—on aesthetic judgment when viewing artworks. Twenty-five participants (data collection still ongoing) freely explored the four panels of the Issenheim Altarpiece (Grünewald, 1512–1516), a Gothic artwork depicting scenes that are at times dramatic and monstrous and at other times fantastical and wondrous. For each panel, they took screenshots of what caught their attention, then completed the AESTHEMOS—a self-administered questionnaire that measures aesthetic emotions (four dimensions: prototypical, pleasant, epistemic, and negative)—and indicated their overall aesthetic appreciation. Finally, the four panels were ranked in order of aesthetic preference and horror. Preliminary results indicate that the influence of aesthetic emotions on aesthetic appreciation differs depending on these rankings. For the two most horrific panels, results show that the aesthetic appreciation score is positively predicted by the intensity of prototypical aesthetic emotions and negatively predicted by the intensity of negative emotions. For the two least horrific panels, only the intensity scores of prototypical aesthetic emotions are positive predictors of aesthetic appreciation. Finally, engagement in the exploration task, measured by the number of screenshots taken, indicates that the higher the number of screenshots, the higher the aesthetic judgment scores—except for one the least horrific artwork. Engagement in exploration appears to play an important role in aesthetic appreciation, especially when artworks present emotionally negative content. The second part of this study (still ongoing) may allow us to further refine this finding. Participants are following the same protocol with the addition of audio guide descriptions during the exploration task: this addition could enhance the aesthetic appreciation of artworks with horror content and lead to a greater role for epistemic emotions in that judgment. Overall, this study proposes to refine cognitive models of aesthetic appreciation by considering the emotions evoked by the content.
6
Artists’ Drawing Strategies Serve to Overcome Visual Processing Limitations
Most people learn to draw casually at an early age, but learning to create accurate observational drawings usually require extensive practice. Why is accurate drawing so hard? And what distinguishes people skilled at accurate drawing from those who are not? Empirical research has primarily studied these questions for the task of copying a source picture. We argue that the difficulty of copying tasks can be explained by limitations of visual memory and peripheral vision. In addition, variation in the control of eye movements could explain mixed findings regarding the relationship between perceptual skill and drawing skill, and regarding the role of prior knowledge in drawing. Artists aiming to create accurate drawings from observation employ a broad suite of strategies for coordinating their eye movements with drawing actions, enabling them to transfer information from the source image to their drawing within the limitations of visual memory and peripheral vision. We advocate for further study of these strategies in naturalistic scenarios that extend beyond copying tasks. Preferred presentation format: Talk
7
Empathy in artworks: Combining evidence from pupillometry, facial EMG and self-reports
Empathic responses to visual art have been shown to engage multiple pathways with psychophysiological evidence generally stronger for figurative than non-figurative content (Gerger, Pelowski, & Leder, 2017). In non-figurative artworks, patterns and forms engage empathic processes differently, potentially reflecting a greater reliance on top-down cognitive interpretation given their lack of animate content (Melcher & Bacci, 2013). Yet objective evidence which does not rely on self-reports studies single aspects of empathy. Grounded in the distinction between cognitive, affective, and motor empathy, the focus of this multi-modal psychophysiological study is to investigate whether empathic responses towards non-figurative art (abstract artworks and landscapes that retain natural scenes without human figures) can be measured objectively and be compared to figurative artworks. Participants (N=27, m=12/f=15; Mean age=33.50, SD=5.90) viewed abstract, landscape, and figurative artworks across three condition blocks: cognitive empathy (valence identification), affective empathy (intensity of felt emotion), and passive viewing. Responses were assessed using self-reports, pupillometry, and facial EMG on a baseline-corrected and valence-specific basis. Participants showed accurate cognitive-based empathic responses in all three artwork types (figure, landscape, abstract) while affective-based empathic responses were more intense for figurative and landscape art, but also evident for abstract art. Motor empathic responses were detected for all artwork types, as evidenced by significant facial muscle activation above baseline. Results suggest that prevailing theories of aesthetic empathy are differentially operative across the three empathic pathways. Motor empathic responses across all artwork types support embodied simulation as a content-independent mechanism (Freedberg & Gallese, 2007), while the content-independence in valence identification suggests a top-down interpretive engagement during cognitive empathy. Sharing emotion even with abstract art—though with reduced intensity, suggests that affective empathy may depend on the availability of a hypothetical persona (Levinson, 1996), an experiential referent possibly more readily evoked by depictions of natural scenes.
8
The painted image as a spatial object: an artistic investigation into the genuineness effect and its neural substrates
The present study explores the dissonances between the experienced presence of the painted image and its digital reproduction, focusing on their material divergence and the consequences it might imply for the viewer’s emotional reactions. Therefore, it is structured employing a theoretical-practical strategy, which combines a comparative review of the neural substrates of aesthetic appreciation with experimental artistic practice. The theoretical analysis approaches the “genuineness effect”, referring to the emotional responses triggered by the physical presence of a valuable object. To address the lack of neurophysiological evidence, we study pictorial images as spatial objects. Beyond the institutional context’s semantic influence, interpreted as increasing activation in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, experiencing the genuine artwork involves a multimodal perception of the physical space where visual inputs prevail. We compare this situated experience with the multimodal incongruity of digital screens, suggesting that digital reproductions demand a higher “top-down” multisensory imagery to compensate for an unimodal set of stimuli that is less intense and lacks afferent reception. Considering paintings as material objects, we highlight the role of the dorsal stream in processing those haptic affordances that the genuine artwork evokes. Departing from Jacqueline Snow’s research on real objects vs image recognition, we suggest that the painting’s physical presence recruits dorsal regions and triggers different motor inhibition processes from those of its bidimensional representation on a screen. These concepts are combined with an experimental artistic practice, which consists of a series of acrylic paint sheets created through a process of reverse painting on glass. The image is revealed by peeling the paint off while being stripped of its traditional support, resulting in an “acrylic skin”. This enhances the materiality of the painted image and, due to the way these pieces reflect light and how they are presented and folded, challenges the fidelity of their photographic reproduction.
9
More than Woven Images? Exploring Tapestry Perception
When engaging with a tapestry, how does attention shift from its pictorial image or content to the tapestry as a woven, material object? Responding to a growing call within art history for new methodologies to study the materiality of art, this research adopts empirical approaches to better understand how tapestries are perceived as both images and material objects. This work presents two studies (N=64 and N=70) exploring how both historical and contemporary tapestries are perceived as distinct artistic and material media, rather than as images or as analogous to paintings. Both studies combine eye-tracking, tactile exploration, and survey data to examine how visual attention, touch, contextual knowledge, and expertise shape viewers’ engagement with the tapestry medium. This presentation will demonstrate the methods and research questions of the studies, as well as the qualitative findings relating to how participants articulate their engagement with tapestries – including what they say they attend to (style, material qualities, or subject matter), the associations that different tapestries evoke and the language they use to describe the works. In a later stage, these self-reports will be related to the patterns observed in eye-tracking data. By relating these self-reports to viewing behavior, we explore how people look at tapestries and aim to understand how viewing behavior, and the aesthetic experience may differ when looking at a tapestry as a material object, rather than as an image.
10
Context affects aesthetic evaluation, being moved, and other emotions
It is almost a truism that context is an important factor both for emotion research and empirical aesthetics. It potentially can influence how emotions are experienced as well as how aesthetic objects are evaluated. Here we studied relations of being moved, an aesthetic (and social) emotion having sad and joyful variants, with other emotions and aesthetic evaluations in an art and a non-art context. In a prestudy, we selected 350 images from the Social-Moral Image Database and asked 120 participants to rate them on the 20 emotion dimensions of the Geneva Emotion Wheel (GEW), plus valence, arousal, being moved, and liking. We found being moved to be positively correlated with a measure of emotion complexity (r = .85) derived from the GEW. Furthermore, being moved was strongly correlated with the emotion of compassion (r = .82), while liking mostly correlated with valence (r = .92). In addition, a clear positive relation between being moved and liking was found for joyful (r = .71), but not for sad images. In a follow-up study, we presented 40 joyful and 40 sad images from the prestudy to 86 participants, either in an art or in a news context. Similar to the prestudy, joyful images were more liked and rated more beautiful and more positive than sad images, whereas sad images led to more complex emotional evaluations and were rated more moving than joyful images. Importantly, we also found context effects: Images presented in an art context were more liked and found more beautiful than in a news context. Furthermore, joyful (but not sad) Images were evaluated more positive and more emotionally moving in an art context. In sum, we could demonstrate complex relations between being moved, other emotions, as well as aesthetic evaluation, and found context effects in line with previous findings.
11
The Dynamics of Looking: Head Turns, Gaze Direction, and the Experience of Art
We investigate how subtle compositional features shape the perceptual and aesthetic experience of viewers, with a particular focus on face perception in art. Our research combines large-scale analyses of portraits, with a focus on the last 700 years of Western Art History, with controlled experimental methods to examine the role of head orientation and gaze direction in modulating perceived expressivity, engagement, and memorability. Our results reveal systematic historical and perceptual patterns. Early portrait traditions before Renanaissance predominantly employed frontal alignment of head and gaze, yielding impressions of stability, iconicity, and reduced dynamism. From the Renaissance onwards, artists increasingly adopted slight head rotations combined with non-aligned gaze directions, including subtle outward gaze deviations. These configurations produce a more dynamic, vivid, and psychologically engaging impression, enhancing perceived liveliness and narrative ambiguity. We further relate these findings to established practices in portrait photography, where strict frontal symmetry is typically avoided. Instead, three-quarter views and off-axis gaze are preferred to enhance perceived depth, authenticity, and emotional accessibility. From a perceptual perspective, such configurations appear to optimize the trade-off between processing fluency and perceptual richness: while canonical face structures support rapid recognition, slight deviations from these templates recruit attentional and predictive mechanisms, thereby increasing viewer engagement without compromising identity processing. Across studies, we demonstrate that even minimal variations in head orientation function as powerful cues for shaping aesthetic experience. By integrating empirical aesthetics, art history, and applied visual practices (e.g. from photography), our work provides a unified account of how portraits—across historical and contemporary contexts—achieve their expressive and affective impact. These findings highlight the importance of micro-compositional factors in visual communication and contribute to a deeper understanding of the perceptual principles underlying compelling imagery.
12
A dissociation between symmetry-driven visual salience and perception of illusory faces revealed by gaze behaviours
Face pareidolia, the perception of illusory faces in inanimate objects and random patterns, such as clouds, power sockets, and automobiles, suggests that the human face detection mechanism is inherently flexible. Vertically symmetrical patterns are known to be particularly potent in evoking face pareidolia, giving rise to percepts that are highly detailed and rich in various social attributes (e.g., gender, expression). However, it remains unclear whether the higher prevalence of illusory face percepts in symmetrical patterns compared to asymmetrical patterns reflects a prior for symmetry in the human face detection mechanism or if it is simply driven by the visual salience of symmetrical form. Here, we tracked observers’ eye movements while they were viewing a unique visual stimulus that contained different areas of interest, each combining horizontal and vertical symmetry, asymmetry, and anti-symmetry. Participants reported whether they experienced any illusory face percepts while viewing each stimulus and identified where in the stimulus the face percepts were located. The majority of illusory face percepts were experienced by observers in regions that were vertically symmetrical but horizontally asymmetrical. In contrast, when participants visually explored the stimuli, the majority of first eye fixations within stimuli occurred in regions that were both vertically and horizontally symmetrical (i.e., bifold symmetry). The pattern of results suggests that, while the presence of symmetrical structure increases visual salience, illusory face perception cannot be accounted for solely by the visual salience of symmetrical patterns. Instead, vertical symmetry in absence of horizontal symmetry might serve as an image-based cue for animacy by triggering an early-stage face processing mechanism in the visual system.
13
Temporal modulation of ambiguity and recurrent Aha moments in contemporary visual art
Ambiguity is a central topic in both perception research and contemporary art. In vision science, ambiguous stimuli reveal the constructive nature of vision, showing how the visual brain organizes incomplete and vague visual information into coherent percepts. In contemporary art, ambiguity is used as a strategy to keep viewers in states of uncertainty, sustaining their attention and encouraging the experience of searching for meaning in visual patterns, while drawing on perceptual principles investigated in vision science. Here, we present and examine works by Vincent Bergeron, who explores transitions from indeterminacy and ambiguity to recognition through visual compositions that unfold over time. He draws on mechanisms of visual perception in order to use them as narrative tools within his work. The works employ fragmentation, temporal smearing, contrast variation, and color manipulations to interrupt and delay the recognition of objects and scenes. These artworks sustain attention by producing recurring cycles of abstraction and recognition, yielding a succession of “Aha” moments in which indeterminate visual information becomes organized into meaningful percepts before dissolving again into uncertainty. Even when the global scene becomes perceptually clear, local uncertainty often remains. We suggest that the alternation between these perceptual states enables viewers to remain in prolonged states of aesthetic experience. The fluctuation itself is central to the aesthetic experience: indeterminacy and ambiguity intensify visual attention and involvement with the art work. By disrupting habitual modes of seeing and requiring viewers to look and search for extended periods of time, these artworks highlight vision itself and reveal the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms through which viewers construct meaning from uncertain visual information. They establish a direct link between contemporary artistic practice and vision science through a shared focus on perceptual ambiguity, indeterminacy, and the “Aha” experience.
14
Cross-Modal Perception in Visual Art: Synesthetic Processes, Aesthetic Experience, and Multisensory Integration Across Artistic Cognition
Background: Synaesthesia in the context of visual arts refers to cross-sensory perceptual phenomena in which stimulation in one sensory modality elicits concurrent experiences in another, such as the perception of colours in response to musical sound. Historically, such phenomena have been reported in relation to artistic practice, with artists including Kandinsky, Van Gogh, and Munch frequently cited as exemplars whose creative output may have been shaped by atypical sensory integration. Contemporary research has expanded this perspective, suggesting that synaesthetic-like experiences may also arise in non-synaesthetic individuals during structured artistic engagement. Methods: This review synthesises theoretical, qualitative, and empirical literature spanning case studies, neuroscientific investigations, scoping reviews, and experimental studies on synaesthesia and visual art perception. A narrative integrative approach was employed to consolidate findings across clinical synaesthesia research, aesthetic neuroscience, and participatory arts studies. Results: The reviewed literature consistently indicates that synaesthesia is associated with heightened engagement in visual arts, enhanced perceptual abilities, and improved visual memory performance, particularly among individuals with multiple synaesthetic modalities. Case-based analyses suggest that synaesthetic perception has historically influenced artistic style, composition, and creative cognition. Recent evidence further demonstrates that multisensory integration in artistic contexts can elicit synaesthetic-like states in non-synaesthetes, particularly through music–visual art interaction, immersive environments, and participatory practices. Experimental findings in virtual reality settings indicate that multisensory imagery can enhance aesthetic evaluation, mediated by increased perceptual vividness and emotional arousal. However, the field remains methodologically heterogeneous, with a predominance of qualitative and case-based approaches and limited large-scale quantitative validation. Furthermore, conceptual ambiguity persists regarding the distinction between synaesthesia and related phenomena such as cross-modal correspondences. Conclusions: Synaesthesia constitutes a significant framework for understanding cross-modal perception in visual arts, bridging historical artistic practice with contemporary cognitive and neuroscientific inquiry. Evidence supports its influence on artistic creation and aesthetic experience.
15
Empirical Support for Wollheim’s Twofoldness in Art Portrait Perception: Evidence from Image Statistics and Eye Tracking
According to Wollheim’s concept of twofoldness, two aspects are perceived simultaneously in paintings: artistic style and depicted object. In this study, Wollheim’s view was tested in two ways: (1) by comparing quantitative image properties (QIPs) between 30 portrait paintings from different art styles (10 each) and photorealistic versions of the respective paintings, and (2) through a pilot eye-tracking study with 18 participants investigating perceptual differences across the 60 stimuli.Following Wollheim’s concept, systematic differences in both QIPs and eye movements were hypothesized, with the assumption that low-level image properties contribute to differences in visual attention and viewing strategies. (1) Using the QIP machine (Redies et al., 2025), 43 QIPs were analyzed via univariate linear models (ANOVA) with FDR correction and effect size estimation, complemented by principal component analysis. Art style significantly affected multiple QIPs, particularly color and luminance measures (mean R, G, B, and L channels, Lightness entropy, Color entropy), as well as structural features (Edge density, Complexity, PHOG and CNN self-similarity, and Mirror symmetry). AI-generated images differed systematically from original paintings, most strongly in Complexity, Color entropy, Edge density, and Fourier slope, with minimal interaction effects across styles. These findings indicate that both art style and image version are characterized by distinct low-level statistical and structural properties. (2) Eye-tracking analysis showed that, relative to photorealistic versions, participants allocated more fixation time to the background than to the depicted person in original paintings, particularly in Expressionist and Impressionist portraits. This pattern suggests that variations in low-level image structure are associated with shifts in visual attention, with photorealistic depictions promoting object-focused processing and original artworks encouraging more holistic viewing strategies. Overall, the results provide empirical evidence consistent with Wollheim’s concept of twofoldness, suggesting that both image statistics and viewing behavior contribute to the simultaneous processing of artistic style and depicted content.
16
Exploring factors contributing to our perceptual appreciation of technical skill, beauty and salient geometry in drawings
It has been argued that creative outputs like paintings, music or drama can be appreciated universally, while an alternative view holds that appreciation of creativity depends heavily on observer experience and knowledge. We address this dichotomy with a focus on the visual arts with two empirical questions: whether technical skill, beauty, and mirror symmetry can be isolated as independent factors in visual aesthetic judgement, and if these factors differ in their contributions between a group of 13 visual artists and 18 control university students. In Experiment 1, we measured contrast thresholds for mirror symmetry detection using a psychometric method of constant stimuli with a 2AFC procedure. Participants showed a range of contrast thresholds, with the artist group showing marginally greater sensitivity than controls. In Experiment 2, one of the authors, and artist, MK created 48 hand-drawn sketches across four categories: faces, insects, flowers, and objects, each rendered on a square canvas with stimuli occupying the central image region. One representative item per category selected by the researchers served as the reference. Participants completed a 2AFC task judging which of two images was more beautiful, more symmetrical, or demonstrated greater technical skill, over repeated and randomised trials. Responses were used to construct within category item ranks which served as a general preference scale for fitting nonparametric psychometric functions of discrimination probability. Results revealed a divergence across judgement dimensions: beauty and technical skill showed the greatest overlap, suggesting partial independence from symmetry as an aesthetic factor. In the group comparison, discrimination sensitivity was higher for artists, particularly on beauty and technical dimensions, and was not strongly correlated with symmetry thresholds measured in Experiment 1. These findings suggest that training refines aesthetic appreciation and discrimination across dimensions that are partially dissociable even in untrained observers.
17
Fake or Fortune? The Effect of Perceived Authenticity Status on the Viewing Behaviours and Aesthetic Evaluations of Faces vs. Paintings
Is an object any less beautiful just because it is a fake? Authenticity status can have a rather complex and multifaceted effect on the aesthetic perception of various stimulus categories. Previous work has shown that copies and forgeries of paintings tend to receive lower monetary and aesthetic evaluations compared to the original artwork (Locher et al., 2015; Rabb et al., 2018), whereas faces with makeup or plastic surgery tend to elicit lower social/moral judgments, but are not penalized in aesthetic ratings compared to natural faces (Liang et al., 2023). These findings highlight a point of potential nuance in the aesthetic appreciation of inauthentic stimuli, modulated by the stimulus type. However, there has yet to be any work directly comparing the costs of “fake beauty” in artworks versus faces, despite the substantial parallels in their social implications (e.g., greater monetary profits through the misrepresentation of identity). As such, we implemented an eye-tracking paradigm to characterize the aesthetic and oculomotor signatures of perceived authenticity status. Participants were first primed with a label corresponding to a high (faces = natural, paintings = original), medium (faces = makeup, paintings = copy), or low authenticity status (faces = plastic surgery, paintings = forgery), and were then shown an image of a human face or still-life painting. Their free-viewing eye movements were recorded during the stimulus presentation period, and they were subsequently asked to rate the image on their familiarity, liking, impressiveness, and desire to engage with it. The results of this experiment will contribute novel insights into the cognitive impact of perceived authenticity on the aesthetic appreciation of faces versus artworks, providing a holistic view into the psychophysiological effects of “fake beauty” and revealing possible consequences associated with modern image manipulation in contexts such as advertising, news, social media, and entertainment.
18
EEG alpha creativity
This study investigated EEG alpha-band activity (8-13 Hz) during artistic creativity across stages of the creative process and across domains. Participants completed parallel figural (drawing) and verbal (poetry) tasks, loosely based on the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT), which included distinct idea generation and idea elaboration stages. Mean alpha power was compared across task stage and domain to assess whether alpha oscillations reflect a general marker of creative cognition or vary with task demands. Figural and verbal tasks were comparable in overall spectral power, though domain-related differences were region-specific and dependent on the task condition. Alpha activity varied significantly by task, with lower alpha power observed during idea generation, suggesting greater cortical engagement during generative processes. Movement-related analyses showed higher alpha power during ideation compared to execution during creative tasks, further supporting the interpretation that reductions in alpha reflect increased active processing. Overall, the findings support a multistage, context-dependent account of creative cognition, in which alpha oscillations do not serve as a uniform marker of creativity but instead vary dynamically across task stage and domain-related demands.
Poster session 2: Technology & Perception
12:30–15:00 Friday August 21, 2026
1
TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS OF VR HEAD-MOUNTED DISPLAYS AND THEIR EFFECTS ON PERCEPTUAL EXPERIENCE: A COMPREHENSIVE REVIEW
Virtual reality (VR) head‑mounted displays (HMDs) are now central tools for studying human perception and creating visually compelling immersive experiences, yet links between hardware specifications and perceptual as well as aesthetically relevant outcomes remain only partially quantified. This review maps thirteen core specifications that are critical for research and artistic or aesthetic applications - resolution, refresh rate, field of view, interpupillary distance (IPD) adjustment, display technology, optical design, motion‑to‑photon latency, tracking modality, eye‑tracking capability, device weight, spatial audio, device type, and binocular configuration - onto constructs in visual, depth and 3D perception, face and social perception, embodiment, comfort, and spatial cognition, with a focus on image sharpness, contrast, colour rendering, depth experience, visual comfort, presence, and scene realism. The review serves as a reference study by presenting a compiled table of 173 high-end HMDs and synthesizing 104 peer‑reviewed empirical studies covering 45 devices, which treats each specification as both a potential experimental confound and a design lever. Key results include: human foveal acuity reaching 94 pixels per degree (PPD), whereas typical consumer devices provide 22–35 PPD, contributing to screen‑door artefacts and limited face and text perception; fixed‑focal‑plane optics creating a vergence–accommodation conflict that induces visual discomfort after about 30 minutes; stereoscopic depth being compressed by roughly 26% relative to real‑world perception; and motion‑to‑photon latencies above 20 ms reducing presence and increasing cybersickness. We further identify specification interactions, such as the combined effects of field of view, IPD handling, and temporal display characteristics on motion clarity, vection, and comfort. Device‑level examples show how continuous IPD adjustment, foveated rendering, high‑contrast wide‑gamut displays, and devices weighing below 500 g can improve comfort, perceived image quality, and sustained presence, thereby supporting richer aesthetic engagement with visually convincing virtual environments and artworks. The review proposes reporting and calibration guidelines, and perceptually informed specification targets for VR engineers and designers.
2
Beyond the Display Case: The Effect of Interactive Virtual Reality on Learning, Aesthetics and Authenticity in Museums
Museums are increasingly turning to digital technologies to engage audiences who may be less inclined to visit traditional exhibitions, particularly in the context of declining attendance following COVID-19. Among these technologies, virtual reality (VR) has emerged as a promising tool for reimaging how visitors encounter collections, offering immersive and interactive experiences with digital replicas. However, museums remain cautious: VR is resource-intensive, and its value must be demonstrated not only in terms of engagement, but also in relation to core institutional priorities such as historical authenticity. In the current study, we ask: what role does interactivity play in shaping visitor experience in museum-based VR? Participants experienced a historically accurate reconstruction of a 17th-century astronomical workshop in Lahore using a VR headset. The experience was developed in collaboration with the History of Science Museum in Oxford and features 3D scans of their collection. In a between-subjects design, half the participants were able to interact with a celestial globe using hand-tracking, while the remainder observed the same experience without control. Pre- and post-experience questionnaires were used to assess learning-related outcomes, aesthetic experience, and perceived object authenticity. We predict that interactivity will enhance all three outcomes and further examine the mechanisms underlying these effects. Specifically, we test whether feelings of agency mediate the relationship between interactivity and visitor experience, and whether individual differences in technological interest and beliefs about the hedonic potential of technology moderate these effects. By situating interactivity within a historically accurate and museum-relevant VR experience, this study contributes to ongoing discussions around digital transformation in museums. The findings aim to demonstrate how interactive design can support learning, enrich aesthetic experiences, and sustain perceptions of authenticity, offering practical insight into how museums might integrate VR in ways that are both effective and aligned with their institutional values.
3
Beyond the Technological Aesthetic: Wearable Design and Emotional Acceptance in Dementia Care
Contemporary wearable technologies are often designed around a visible “technological aesthetic” characterised by sleek surfaces, optimisation, and the visual language of data-driven efficiency. While such aesthetics frequently signify innovation within consumer technology culture, their implications within dementia care remain underexplored. This study argues that the appearance and material expression of wearable technologies significantly shape how devices are perceived, accepted, and emotionally negotiated by older adults living with dementia. Many dementia-related wearables adopt medicalised or surveillance-oriented aesthetics that may unintentionally amplify feelings of incapability, dependency, or social stigma. Rather than functioning as empowering objects, highly technological forms can reinforce users’ awareness of cognitive decline and contribute to emotional resistance toward long-term wearability. This suggests that acceptance of wearable technologies cannot be understood solely through usability or functionality, but must also be examined through aesthetics, embodiment, and the wearer’s cultural perception of technology. Rather than positioning contemporary jewellery as a direct design solution, this paper adopts it as a critical mode of thinking through the relationship between body, identity, and worn objects. Contemporary jewellery has long questioned how objects interact with the body beyond utility, operating instead through ambiguity, symbolism, intimacy, and personal meaning. Drawing upon this perspective, the paper proposes an alternative framework for reconsidering wearable technologies in dementia care, not merely as monitoring devices attached to the body, but as objects capable of participating in emotional identity, self-perception, and embodied experience. By bringing contemporary jewellery into dialogue with wearable technologies, this study reconsiders how assistive devices might move beyond dominant “high-tech” aesthetics toward more sensitive and evocative forms of design. In doing so, it contributes to broader discussions surrounding perception, care, and the future relationship between bodies and technologies.
4
Visually-Enticed Movement Amplification in Virtual Reality for Stroke Rehabilitation
Virtual reality is a powerful artistic medium that can transport people to imaginary worlds and immerse them in transformative experiences. Sometimes that transformation can have therapeutic potential, such as rehabilitation of stroke patients. Post-stroke movement deficits pose a major burden, yet intensive rehabilitation remains inaccessible. The development of engaging virtual reality apps with gamified tasks to promote different aspects of upper limb recovery at home is a potential scalable solution. One of the key challenges faced by stroke patients is termed learned non-use. For example, if a patient suffers from a deficit of movement in one arm, they are likely to rely on the other arm for activities of daily living and over time the use of the paretic arm decreases. One promising potential treatment is to use amplified or enhanced movements of the affected limb in a virtual environment to try to return the paretic arm to normal levels of mobility in the virtual world and encourage its use. In collaboration with colleagues in the Computing Department (SeeVR Lab) at University of London, Goldsmiths, we have developed a VR application in which participants pick apples from a virtual tree in a beautiful landscape. In this aesthetically pleasing environment, the relationship between the real and the virtual hand can be altered, and the virtual hand can be guided to the target to different extents through visual enhancement. This project will systematically investigate the effects of different magnitudes and forms of guidance on healthy participants’ sense of agency, movement accuracy and choice of arm to move, ultimately informing the design of efficacious rehabilitation for stroke patients.
5
Becoming a Tree: Perceptual Body–Environment Mapping in a VR Body Scan Experience
Body scan meditation guides attention sequentially across different regions of the body, yet it typically relies on verbal instruction and sustained internal attentional control. For users in low-energy evening states, understanding instructions, maintaining attention, and actively sensing the body may themselves become burdensome. This project addresses a perceptual translation question: can the invisible internal attentional path of body scan be transformed into environmental events that can be perceived and followed through visual motion, spatial sound, and non-human embodiment in virtual reality? Situated in the context of evening sleep preparation and sleep difficulties during the menopausal transition, we designed Becoming a Tree, a VR body scan prototype. In the experience, users “become a tree” from a first-person perspective: the feet correspond to underground roots, the torso to the trunk, the shoulders to lateral branches, and the head to the canopy. Rather than being guided primarily by verbal prompts, the body scan is structured through a sequence of environmental events: roots grow downward into the soil, a squirrel moves upward along the trunk, a bird lands on a branch at shoulder height, and the canopy sways with high-altitude wind. Each visual motion event is synchronized with spatialized natural sound, forming a continuous attentional path from the lower body to the head. The design is informed by interviews with six women in perimenopause, menopause, or post-menopause, as well as feedback from a formative prototype experience. The interviews showed that evening bodily discomfort, emotional fluctuation, and sleep difficulty were often intertwined, while participants commonly used sound, natural environments, and bodily rituals for self-regulation. Prototype feedback suggested that the tree avatar allowed some participants to experience bodily awareness as “becoming part of the environment,” rather than directly monitoring the body. We present Becoming a Tree as a perception-driven VR case study, showing how visual-spatial cues may reorganize bodily attention in evening self-regulation contexts and support softer, less evaluative forms of body awareness.
6
Neurophysiological Responses to Digitalized and Natively Digital Art: The Role of Framing and Expectations in Virtual Museum Experiences
Introduction - Today, the context of art consumption plays a significant role in shaping the aesthetic experience, influencing both cognitive and emotional processes. With the increasing use of digital media for both the creation and the presentation of artworks, new modalities of art engagement have emerged. However, it remains largely unexplored whether a context that is coherent with the native format of the artwork (e.g., a virtual environment in which digital artworks are experienced) influences art perceptions. The present study investigates how the congruence between artwork type (digital vs. digitized) and context of consumption (digital environment) affects the aesthetic experience within a virtual exhibition. Methods - A between-subjects design was adopted in which participants (N=60) explored an immersive environment containing 12 abstract digital artworks selected through a pretest. Three experimental conditions were created, differing in the type of communication provided prior to the experience: no framing, congruent framing (“the artworks you are about to see are digital”), and incongruent framing (“the artworks you are about to see are digitalized”). The framing is conceptualized as a mechanism capable of activating interpretative expectations that guide the processing of artistic stimuli. A multimodal approach was employed, integrating neurophysiological measures (EEG, eye-tracking, skin conductance, and heart rate) with post-experience subjective evaluations, allowing for an integrated analysis of attentional, affective, and evaluative processes. Results - It is hypothesized that conditions of congruence between stimulus and context facilitate processing and enhance the quality of the aesthetic experience, increasing attentional, affective, and evaluative processes, whereas incongruent conditions generate greater dissonance and distinct neurophysiological patterns. This study contributes to the psychology of aesthetics and neuroaesthetics literature by providing empirical evidence on the role of expectations in shaping aesthetic experience in virtual environments and offers implications for the design of digital museum experiences, highlighting the importance of aligning content, context, users’ interpretative frameworks, and the cognitive and emotional processes involved.
7
Data Memorialisation. Invoking the Sublime in Historical Data Visualisation
Digital Humanists have grappled with visual representations of data in the context of digital projects addressing troubled pasts and their legacies. Data visualisation techniques facilitate the analysis and understanding of phenomena at scale, favouring effective, simple, and immediate ways of information sense-making. However, they also impose distance between the viewer and the subject, which comes not only from the abstracting process behind data capture, but also from certain aesthetic choices aimed at achieving neutrality and objectivity. Visualising data that documents extremely sensitive historical events, including armed conflicts, colonial violence, genocides, enslavement, and events of mass coercion and control, with conventional rhetorical data visualisation forms favours a state of emotional dissonance and distancing from the subject matter that several authors have called into question. D’ Ignazio and Klein (2020) have highlighted the importance of “feeling” rather than just “seeing” data in visualisations. Presner (2016) advocates for the design of “generous interfaces” that facilitate ethical encounters with the data rather than merely efficient communication and information retrieval. His allusion to the notion of the ‘data sublime’, which was first introduced by Stallabrass (2003, 2011) in relation to aesthetic tropes in Digital Art, invites one to tap into the rich realm of possibilities that the sublime offers to trigger emotional and sensorial responses in viewers that engage with masses of data. The longstanding conceptualisation of the sublime has generated a wealth of research into the shifting experience of awe and terror that stems from embodied experience. This poster attempts to establish a preliminary framework to embed the data sublime in visualisations by reflecting on matters of multisensory embodiment and spatialisation, using a series of exemplary art installations that touched on troubled pasts, such as Archie Moore’s ‘Kith and Kin’ (2024), Mabel O. Wilson, J. Meejin Yoon, and Eric Höweler’s, ‘Unknown, Unknown’ (2023), and others. Bibliography Catherine D’Ignazio, & Lauren Klein. (2020). 3. On Rational, Scientific, Objective Viewpoints from Mythical, Imaginary, Impossible Standpoints. In Data Feminism. https://data-feminism.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/5evfe9yd Jules Moloney; Kinetic Architectural Skins and the Computational Sublime. Leonardo 2009; 42 (1): 65–70. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon.2009.42.1.65 Presner, Todd. “8. The Ethics of the Algorithm: Close and Distant Listening to the Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive.” Probing the ethics of Holocaust culture. Harvard University Press, 2017. 167-202. Stallabrass, Julian. “THE AESTHETICS OF NET.ART.” Qui Parle, vol. 14, no. 1, 2003, pp. 49–72. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20686165. Accessed 10 May 2026. Stallabrass, Julian, and Trevor Paglen. “Negative dialectics in the Google era: A conversation with Trevor Paglen.” October 138 (2011): 3-14. Supper, Alexandra. “Sublime Frequencies: The Construction of Sublime Listening Experiences in the Sonification of Scientific Data.” Social Studies of Science, vol. 44, no. 1, 2014, pp. 34–58. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43284219. Accessed 10 May 2026.
8
From Capture to Re-Experience: An Embodied Cognition Approach to Affective Reenactment in Photography
While research in phototherapy and therapeutic photography has explored post-capture engagement through methods such as projective work and photo elicitation, photographs are often treated primarily as external stimuli. What remains less well understood is the intra-individual affective trajectory — how affective experience unfolds between the moment of capture and the photographer’s later encounter with their own image, a “temporal gap” where a photograph may function as a stable record of a prior emotional state. We present exploratory findings from The Light Archive (an international open-call photography archive; data drawn from a China-focused open call, N=30). Participants reported their emotional states at the moment of capture and during retrospective viewing using a set of 24 affective descriptors. Exploratory qualitative analysis revealed that 11 of 21 respondents (52%) reported a meaningful affective shift, with images linked to intense emotions at capture — such as anxiety or loss — frequently associated with calm, gratitude, or newly constructed meaning upon reflection. These findings provide initial support for what we term affective re-experience, where self-generated images act as a “temporal bridge,” enabling reflective re-enactment of prior emotional states. Building on the framework of perceptual ambiguity and SeIns (Semantic Instability), we further hypothesize that image abstraction may moderate this effect: because ambiguous imagery invites viewers to fill perceptual gaps with their own thoughts and feelings, it may deepen this process. As the present dataset comprises varied image types rather than controlled levels of abstraction, this hypothesis is theoretical and is currently being examined in an ongoing pilot study.
9
Embodied Agents in Contemporary Visual Arts: The role of intentionality on aesthetic appreciation of robotic systems
The use of AI as a tool for contemporary art has burgeoned in recent years. However, relatively little attention has been paid to the use of robotics as companions in the art making process. We know that there is a relationship between intentionality, anthropomorphism and the evaluation of AI art (Chamberlain et al. 2018; Moruzzi, 2024). We also know that the language describing AI can impact the degree to which it is anthropomorphised (Epstein et al., 2020). The current studies systematically investigated the influence of movement and intentionality on aesthetic evaluation in drawings made using robotics. In our first study (n=108) we systematically manipulated the human-like features of robotic systems to investigate whether human resemblance plays a role in aesthetic responses to robotic drawings. We manipulated two core aspects of human resemblance through movement (the degree of humanness of the movement), and anthropomorphism (the degree of human resemblance of the machine to a human arm). Participants were asked to rate a series of drawings made by the robotic systems. We found that anthropomorphism predicted aesthetic responses to the drawings, but there was no difference in response to the varying degrees of movement or human resemblance. In a follow up study (n=77) we manipulated intentionality in the robotic systems with contextual cues, framing them as an agent or a tool, and movement. Framing the robotic system as an agent increased perceived intentionality and more human movement increased aesthetic appreciation. These findings suggest that mediating AI generated art through robotic systems can shape aesthetic responses to their artistic outcomes. Chamberlain, R., Mullin, C., Scheerlinck, B. & Wagemans, J. (2018) Putting the Art in Artificial: Aesthetic responses to computer-generated art. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts. 12 (2), 177-192. Epstein, Z., Levine, S., Rand, D. G., & Rahwan, I. (2020). Who gets credit for AI-generated art?. Iscience, 23(9). Moruzzi, C. (2022, June). The (Artificial) Physicality of Creativity: How Embodiment Influences Perceptions of Creativity. In ICCC (pp. 78-86).
10
Coastal Synchrony
Coastal Synchrony is a continuously evolving generative digital artwork – a mixed-media coastal landscape designed for hospital environments in South Wales. The work operates at the intersection of generative data-driven art practice, empirical aesthetics, and arts in health, using live tidal, meteorological, and lunar data from South Wales coastline to generate a visual environment that shifts in real time. The project is underpinned by established frameworks in environmental psychology. Ulrich’s Stress Recovery Theory and Kaplan’s Attention Restoration Theory both point to the restorative potential of natural imagery, even in mediated form. Findings from empirical aesthetics and biophilic design further inform decisions around visual scenery, colour and movement, ensuring aesthetic choices are evidence-based rather than intuitive alone. A central concern of the work is the distortion of time experienced in clinical settings. Hospitals are sealed environments, artificially lit and climate-controlled, where ordinary temporal markers disappear. Coastal Synchrony introduces the tidal rhythm as a grounding motif: a quiet reminder that the natural world continues at its own pace outside these walls. Surrealism’s language of warped temporality provides a conceptual framework for this artwork, such as the dreamlike treatment of familiar forms. This will inform the aesthetic selectively, without positioning the work explicitly within that tradition. Development follows a practice-based methodology combining photography, computational prototyping in p5.js, live tidal data fetched from a coastal monitoring API, and JavaScript libraries for visual rendering. This technical framework is shaped alongside qualitative research: focus group consultations with NHS clinical staff across South Wales hospitals will inform decisions around placement, content and the behaviour of the work across extended viewing periods. Whilst digital art in hospital settings is an emerging field across England, very little or no provision currently exists in South Wales. This project seeks to address that gap, contributing to both a working prototype and a replicable methodology for perception-informed, data-responsive art practice.
11
Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne: Visual Culture and Eye Movements
Aby Warburg (1866-1929) as eldest son expected to inherit the prominent bank in Hamburg with long tradition and international connections, but from early age Aby had other ambition: books and arts. His most striking Bilderatlas Mnemosyne presents an ambitious, unfinished attempt to trace visual, cultural, and correspondences between images across time and space. Despite personal and historical challenges, Warburg accumulated books, artefacts, and ideas, creating the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (KBW) in Hamburg. After his death, his collaborators and supporters rescued the KBW from fascism, and it now forms the core of the Warburg Institute in London. Begun in 1927 and developed over two years, the Bilderatlas consisted of changing arrangements of images pinned to large black panels. These panels brought together reproductions, photographs, diagrams, sketches, postcards, adverts, newspaper clippings, and other printed materials, inviting comparison across style, gesture, colour, texture, structure, symbolic language, and recurring visual motifs. Rather than presenting images as isolated artworks, Warburg’s panels created networks of visual association, raising the question of whether some of these proposed correspondences can be explored empirically through eye movements. In this pilot study, we examined how viewers compare images within Panel 39. Using mobile eye tracking, we asked participants to inspect a reproduction of the panel and identify links between the 20 images presented within it. The aim was not to test Warburg’s broader ideas about cultural memory and the afterlife of images directly, but to examine how gaze behaviour relates to visual comparison within one panel of the Bilderatlas. Preliminary data from 10 volunteers showed some converging patterns and similarities between participants, although individual differences were also present. These early observations suggest that viewers may share some strategies when inspecting the panel. This pilot therefore shows how eye tracking can make visual comparison in the Bilderatlas empirically observable.
12
Art is not what you are seeing, but what you believe that you are seeing
Seeing is not through the eyes but through the mind. Beyond its appearance, we read art depending on the background and context that frame it. This is also the nature of seeing. Perception operates by interpreting sensory information. Considering this gap, I play with what is shown and how it will be understood. At the Royal College of Art, I was drawn to the homeless who shared the streets yet remained absent from our attention. By carrying them into my paintings and 3D-pen drawings, I let the viewer meet them differently, simply as human beings. My other drawings explore how little can hold how much. A line between two figures tells an entire relationship; a few ink marks on an empty page illustrate everyday life with philosophical symbols. Hundreds of portraits drawn in one unbroken line gather into a single continuous human fabric. I also work in digital media, including augmented and virtual reality. I traced the stains of digital beings within human environments and brought them back to life in AR. I also imagined traveling into the brain, scattering neurons across a vast space so that these star-like cells compose a micro universe. Recently, I’ve been working on photography, experimenting with the role of ambiguity in art. Against the traditional notion that the camera captures external reality, I manipulate light and lens to render the scene abstract. Through layered bokeh, the image stops insisting on a single truth and opens its interpretation to the viewer. Art is like a puzzle. Artists create meanings and messages, but the puzzle is only completed when audiences add their impressions and interpretations. At VSAC 2026, I would like to introduce my artworks and share how they engage with human cognition and the act of seeing.
13
Dimensions of Experiencing a Turrell Skyspace in Relation to Well-being
Despite growing interest in the relevance of art engagement for mental well‑being, empirical research detailing the lived experiential qualities of specific artworks, and how these relate to aesthetic evaluation and well‑being, remains limited, particularly for contemporary art. The present study examines these questions in a James Turrell Skyspace installation. Although Skyspaces are often described as contemplative or transformative and are widely accessed by the public, empirical investigations of the experiences they elicit are lacking. Using a within‑participant crossover design, participants (N = 143) visited both a Turrell Skyspace and a Garden as a nature comparison condition, in counterbalanced order. Pre- and post-experience measures assessed aesthetic evaluation (liking, beauty, interest), bodily sensations, time perception, awe and wonder, and various dimensions of well‑being. In addition, emotional responses were classified using an Experience Type framework based on latent profile analysis, which identifies distinct types of art engagement (e.g., Harmonious, Novel, Transformative). Results indicated that traditional aesthetic evaluations did not differ significantly between the Skyspace and the Garden, nor were they moderated by stable individual differences such as art knowledge and aesthetic responsiveness. However, several experiential dimensions revealed differences between spaces. The Skyspace was associated with higher mood arousal and more frequent reports of head‑centered bodily activation, whereas the Garden elicited stronger nature connectedness, lower bodily disturbance, and an overestimation of time. Experience Types differed across spaces, with Harmonious experiences occurring more frequently in the Garden and Transformative experiences more often in the Skyspace. Across both spaces, Experience Type was a stronger predictor of aesthetic evaluation and well‑being outcomes than the space itself. Overall, the findings suggest that the Skyspace and the Garden did not differ in overall appreciation, but differed in the type of experience they elicited, with distinct Experience Types providing a clearer account of aesthetic evaluation and well‑being than space alone.
14
Shifting paradigms from artificial rating tasks towards ecological measures for aesthetic experience decoding
Personalized presentation of aesthetic stimuli, e.g. images or music, could improve user experience in digital spaces, as well as optimize potential health and well-being benefits of art engagement. Currently, personalized presentation of aesthetic stimuli relies on explicit user feedback which requires cognitive effort that might interrupt and lessen aesthetic experience. Physiological computing systems, e.g. Brain-Computer-Interfaces (estimating user states from their brain signals), on the other hand, allow implicit and real-time decoding of mental and embodied states, e.g. affects or attention, related to aesthetic experience. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art decoding approaches still use classical stimulus presentation and rating approaches that violate the embodied nature of aesthetic experience. For example, Machine Learning based decoding models are typically trained on a small set of aesthetic stimuli and corresponding labels, e.g. like ratings. However, rating tasks introduce additional physiological activity that will not be present during implicit aesthetic experience decoding applications in real life. Therefore, the generalizability of such models to real use-cases remains limited. Instead, we propose a novel and more ecologically valid experimental protocol that can be used for real-time decoding. Here, aesthetic appreciation will be estimated implicitly from user interaction with the system, e.g. engagement time. As time might not always be indicative of engagement, physiological features, e.g. brain activity related to sustained attention, are used to further refine decoding performance. Then, only those trials where the user was engaged will be considered in order to optimize personalized aesthetic stimuli presentation by a recommender system. Finally, we propose different optimization targets for different applications, e.g. optimizing visual art presentation based on engagement time and sustained attention could be used to promote slow-looking. We hope that this work modestly contributes towards a paradigm shift in physiological computing as well as towards the development of beneficial aesthetic stimuli presentation applications.
15
Follow the Gestalt: dissociating physical and cognitive effort in copying behavior
When we carry out an action – for example, when doing embroidery – its difficulty reflects both a physical – threading a needle through fabric, switching threads – and a cognitive effort of keeping the pattern in memory, locating the next patch, etc. We investigate an interplay between these components by letting a small group of 11 participants to decide which of the two patterns is easier to copy and leting them copy it. Patterns were combinations of 1 to 3 forms and 1 to 3 colors, arranged as repeating structures across rows, columns, left or right diagonals, as element repetition, or in random order. After a series of decision trials, one of the chosen patterns was randomly selected and the participant was asked to reproduce it to prevent the electoral decisions not appear meaningless (101 selection trials, 15 copying trials). The analysis showed that participants tended to choose patterns with a shorter copying path, i.e., in 77% of trials, they picked one that required less physical effort. In the remaining trials where participants chose a physically more effortful pattern, we identified four strategies. First, visually orderly patterns were preferred over simpler but random ones. Second, within orderly patterns, cardinal layouts were favored over diagonal layouts. Third, patterns with fewer colors were preferred over those with more colors. Finally, despite instructions for picking the easier pattern to copy, some participants avoided the simplest single-form single-color patterns, favoring more complex but less monotonous alternatives. The analysis of copying showed that the participants frequently deviated from an optimal behavior following suitable patterns that lower the cognitive effort. To summarize, participants used Gestalt-based perceptual organization as a heuristic to estimate physical and cognitive effort required for copying a pattern. They prioritized patterns that lowered the cognitive load over the patterns that minimized physical effort .
16
A headwinds bias in visual attention: Selective detection of self-disadvantaging changes in a game of Pong
When evaluating games and other interactive systems, we selectively recall features which made it harder (headwinds) rather than easier (tailwinds) to achieve our goals. For example, after playing a competitive game of Pong, we might be biased to remember a sticky joystick, or how our opponent unfairly started the game with an extra life. Does the tendency to overweight our headwinds when judging interactive systems first emerge in memory, or might it originate earlier, in visual attention and perception? If so, when playing a game of Pong against a computer-controlled paddle, people might be more likely to notice changes that impede their goals, relative to changes that help them. In a preregistered experiment, 160 online players completed a 60-second game of Pong with an embedded measure of visual change detection/blindness. Every five seconds, the screen flickered gray for 150ms, masking a 5% length change in one paddle. In Headwinds games, the changes hindered the player (either the player’s paddle shortened, or the computer paddle lengthened); in Tailwinds games, the changes helped the player (either the player’s paddle lengthened, or the computer paddle shortened). After the game, we measured players’ awareness of the visual changes and their impressions of whether the game was fair. Although paddle length changes were perfectly matched across conditions, players were substantially more likely to notice Headwinds changes vs. Tailwinds changes (65% vs. 35%) and to judge Headwinds vs. Tailwinds games as unfair (74% vs. 46%). Players selectively noticed changes that hindered them, and were blind to changes that helped them. We propose that the headwinds/tailwinds evaluative bias is rooted in a visual information processing bias, shaping not just what we recall, but what we even see in the first place. We offer recommendations for how to make games and interactive systems feel more fair.
17
Temperament Dimensions and Perception
Each individual has a unique way of perceiving the world, shaped by their cognitive and behavioral tendencies. However, there is ongoing debate as to whether differences in perception reflect variation in sensory processing or interpretation. This study examines whether individual differences in temperament are associated with measurable differences in low-level perceptual processes. Previous research has linked personality traits, such as those described in the Big Five, to perceptual tendencies (i.e, sensitivity to threat or novelty). The present study instead utilizes the Fisher Temperament Inventory (FTI), a 56-item personality measure derived from neuroimaging data and organized around four neurochemical systems: Serotonin (Builder), Dopamine (Explorer), Testosterone (Director), and Estrogen (Negotiator). Individuals vary in the degree to which they express each domain, often showing relative dominance in one or two. Color discrimination tasks focus on long and medium wavelength sensitivity as a proxy for estrogen related processing. Mental rotation is assessed using a variant of the Shepard and Metzler task to index testosterone related spatial processing. Bistable perception under noise and no-noise conditions, using geometric variations of the Necker cube, are used to examine serotonin and dopamine related processing differences. This study seeks to explore whether temperament, as defined by the FTI, is associated with variation in low-level perceptual processing, and to what extent such differences may contribute to individual variation in perceptual experience. It is hypothesized that individuals scoring higher on specific temperament dimensions will show corresponding performance differences across tasks. These findings aim to bridge personality neuroscience and perceptual processing, providing a behavioral framework for understanding temperament-linked cognitive variation.
18
Perception of accent in childhood and adolescence: impact of functional impairments.
Accents change the structure of visual field and provide a strong directionality bias (Attneave, 1968, Pinna et al., 2018, Pinna et al., 2025). Accent contributes to perceptual organization (grouping, segmentation) by triggering stimulus-driven attention in the cases of minimal changes in shape, contrast, orientation. Although much is known about perceptual processes in healthy individuals, much is known about developmentally different and functionally impaired groups. Is the gaze transfer in normal and mentally impaired individuals the same when observing accentuated shapes? What are the costs and processing differences? These are the questions that we were examining in our study. In our study, we used a between-group experimental design and tested children with mental disabilities (experimental group; n=39) and typically developing children and adolescents (controls; n=54) in the age range 12-18. We tested fixational eye movements in perceptual organization (particularly, accentuation). Experimental setting was entirely stimulus-driven (subjects did not have to fulfill specific instructions). Eye movements were recorded with a Tobii Pro Nano video-oculograph, 60 Hz; stimuli were presented on a Lenovo ThinkPad T520p-280 (15.6 in, 1920 x 1080 px) computer screen. The distance to the screen was 65 cm. The analysis of eye movements indicate that experimental group has significantly more but a rather heterogenous set of fixations. Further, fixation duration is substantially shorter in the experimental group. Overall findings indicate that the sensitivity to accent and directional effects is significantly weaker in experimental group. Our results will be discussed in the context of previous developmental findings and mental impairments in the childhood and adolescence. Finally, we will describe some generalizations and possible applications of our results to the diagnostics.
19
Were Ancient Egyptians Inspired by Golden Ratio Geometry?
The concept of the Golden Ratio (phi)has often been invoked in the design of the Egyptian Pyramids, but art historians generally discredit this level of geometric sophistication, taking the view that Egyptians employed integer ratios in their agriculture an architecture, and that the appearance of irrational number Golden-Ratio triangles in the Great Pyramid is merely coincidental. There are two options for Golden Ratio triangles: a tall isosceles Golden Triangle with Side/Base = Phi, and the Keplerian right triangle with Hypotenuse/Base = Phi. The latter would provide a pyramid of slope angle of 51.8 deg, as distinct from 53.1 deg for the Pythagorean 3:4:5 right triangle, and a survey of Egyptian pyramids shows a roughly even split between these tightly specified options. However, the much steeper angle of 72 deg for the true Golden Triangle has been less explored. In fact, the earliest pyramids, the Djoser and Meidum stepped pyramids built by Pharaoh Djoser from ~4600 years before present, match this angle for their steep sides, suggesting that the stepped structure was a compromise inspired by the Golden Triangle concept. The idea that the Golden Triangle was a foundational concept from the earliest era of Egyptian monumental building may seem far-fetched, but it is supported by evidence from wall paintings, inscriptions, manuscripts, and obelisk points. Curiously enough, there are no depictions of the Egyptian pyramids anywhere in the ancient culture, either in their extensive wall paintings or in any other kinds of writings or carvings. There was, however, a hieroglyphic word for ‘pyramid’ dating back to the early part of the Old Kingdom, ~4300 YBP. This hieroglyph consisted of a narrow isosceles triangle with a triangular base, of very diberent proportions to the physical pyramids, accompanied by other identifying symbols. Similar symbols were used in hieroglyphs for other terms, such as ‘providing’ or ‘eternal life’. The same narrow isosceles triangle can be found in ancient papyrus manuscripts, though evidently as a symbol for the concept of ‘triangle’ rather than the subject of geometrical analysis (which was analyzed on a case-by-case basis rather than through general principles). Finally, the tetrahedral capstones of Egyptian obelisks are much narrower than the pyramids they flank, and again tend to match the shapes of the narrow Golden Triangle. The angular proportions of these various triangular symbols are a close match to the 72 deg base angle of the Golden triangle, and are essentially invariant over the millennia of Egyptian history. It therefore seems too much of a coincidence to assume that the triangles in all these diverse media just happen to match each other. Instead, it suggests that this shape had an underlying significance of representing the transcendental essence of a proportion (phi) that could not be captured by whole numbers, thus representing the eternity that they sought in their funerary architecture.
Poster session 3: Empirical Aesthetics & AI/Technology
12:30–15:00 Saturday August 22, 2026
1
Emotional Responses to Renaissance Painting: A Comparison Between Venetian and Bohemian Works
The rediscovery of classical antiquity during the Renaissance initiated a profound cultural transformation. Artists developed new approaches to representation, emphasizing realism, linear perspective, anatomical accuracy, and the careful use of light and shadow (Yao, 2024). These innovations originated in Italy, but their subsequent spread across Europe was uneven (Correa-Herran et al., 2020). While early Renaissance art was grounded in harmony and balance, artists in subsequent periods placed greater emphasis on art’s capacity to evoke emotional responses. This tendency is particularly evident in Venetian painting between 1500 and 1650, whereas artists in regions north of the Alps continued to prioritize detailed observation (Kaup, 2018). Forty religious paintings dated between 1550 and 1661 were selected for the study, half were drawn from the Venetian region and half from the Bohemian region. Among those, 11 paintings presented chiaroscuro, a technique characterized by the dramatic use of light and shadow. The participants (N=146) rated the paintings on five emotional dimensions (being moved, beauty, pleasure, sadness, shock). Responses were provided using a continuous slider, with participants indicating their answers by moving a cursor along a line. The study was conducted online. Data were analysed using generalized linear mixed-effects models with an ordered beta distribution to account for the distribution of responses. Results indicate that Venetian paintings, compared to Bohemian paintings elicited higher feelings of being moved, sadness, and being shocked. Furthermore, paintings employing chiaroscuro conveyed stronger emotions of being moved, beauty, pleasure and sadness. These findings suggest that Renaissance techniques and concepts did not spread evenly, as evidenced by differences between Italian and Bohemian artworks. Moreover, the techniques employed by Venetian painters, such as chiaroscuro, continue to resonate with modern audiences. This supports the idea that certain visual mechanisms of emotional and aesthetic experience retain their efficacy across historical and cultural contexts (Redies, 2015).
2
Beyond Artistic Modality: Shared Neural Mechanisms of Drawing and Music in Cognitive Empowerment and Neuroplasticity
Art is a powerful yet underutilized driver of human cognition and brain plasticity. My Cognitive-Kinesthetic (C-K) training method, developed to rehabilitate function in blindness by teaching drawing from tactile memory without vision, was paradoxically rooted in visual art. Even over brief training period, this approach produces robust, lasting gains that generalize beyond drawing to enhance multisensory spatial cognition, memory, and navigation, accompanied by rapid large-scale brain reorganization. Crucially, this same method proves equally effective in sighted individuals under visual drawing conditions, enabling a direct comparison with active music making - another deeply embodied art form. Functional MRI reveals a striking convergence between drawing and music-making within the insular cortex—a key integrative hub coordinating perception, action, and higher-order cognition. This overlap is selective to active engagement: it emerges during drawing and music performance, but not during passive viewing or listening to music, highlighting a shared action-driven neural mechanism across the arts. These findings point to a fundamental principle: across artistic modalities, it is active, embodied practice that recruits common neural systems capable of driving rapid and transferable neuroplasticity. This convergence carries both philosophical and practical significance, reframing the arts as gateways to core cognitive operations. By uncovering shared mechanisms between visual art and music, this work highlights their potential as powerful, unified tools for cognitive enhancement and neurorehabilitation across all levels of visual function
3
Seeing Between the Lines: Figure–Ground Ambiguity and Aesthetic Preference in Islamic geometric patterns
Visual ambiguity has been proposed as a crucial element in art. Although this ambiguity can arise at multiple levels in the visual hierarchy, it is often the semantic level which is the focus of research. In this study, we assess the aesthetic quality of mere organizational ambiguity, induced by multistable figure-ground organization. We employed Islamic geometric patterns (IGPs) as an authentic, ambiguous artform, due to its overlapping lines and resultant grouping. Figure-ground thereby appears on two levels. Autonomous shapes (i.e., bounded white space) can be seen as a mode of repetition (i.e., compartment). On a more hierarchical level, multiple compartments can be visually grouped to function as a mode of repetition (i.e., component). The figure that is seen as the mode of repetition, defines the organization. Four Persian/Islamic IGPs were manipulated by means of branch sharpness of its core polygons. In a first experiment, a direct rating of ambiguity and liking was collected. Results revealed that branch sharpness is an effective way to manipulate perceptual ambiguity. Cluster analysis identified three groups of participants based on their correlation between rated ambiguity and liking (i.e., negative, positive, and absent). To avoid a confound of visual complexity, in a second study, an indirect measure of ambiguity was employed. Using an innovative interface, participants directly annotated the figures they perceived in the given IGPs (i.e., compartments and/or components). Results about the frequency and order of selected figures confirmed that symmetry, enclosure, compactness, and size affect figure-ground organization. The number of (dominant) selected figures was used as an indirect measure of ambiguity. Again, the link with liking revealed the same three clusters. We conclude that the appreciation of organizational ambiguity is individually defined, in line with semantic ambiguity. The results of this study will be discussed in the context of personality differences.
4
Beyond the Neuromyth: Object Visualisation, Neuroscience, and Artistic Creativity
For decades, the concept of the “visual learner” has been dismissed as a neuromyth by educational theorists (Pashler et al., 2008; Newton, 2015). However, this denunciation stems from a failure to differentiate distinct visual cognitive processes, treating visualisation as a unitary phenomenon. By oversimplifying visual perception, educational frameworks and technological systems have inadvertently limited the nurturing of human imagination and creative potential. Neuroscience reveals two complementary visual pathways: the dorsal (“where/how”) stream, which supports spatial visualisation – involving dynamic transformations, spatial relations, and structural patterns and the ventral (“what”) stream, which underpins object visualisation – characterised by high-resolution, holistic mental imagery rich in colour, texture, detail, and aesthetic qualities (Kozhevnikov et al., 2005, 2013, 2022). While spatial visualisation is widely recognised for driving STEM innovation, object visualisation serves as the primary engine of artistic creativity, aesthetic meaning-making, and associative perceptual experience across diverse disciplines. This presentation advances a more granular model of visual intelligence. Object and spatial visualisers employ distinct image schemas when mapping conceptual domains, furthering complementary forms of innovation: analytical and transformative versus vivid and integrative. Drawing on empirical cognitive science, my doctoral research at the Transdisciplinary School, University of Technology Sydney (UTS), bridges neuroscience with human-centred design to explore these differences and applications. Aligned with the VSAC “Vision Forward: Perception, Art & Technology” theme, this work advocates for perception-driven tools, interfaces, and environments that actively stimulate the full spectrum of visual cognition. By designing systems that nurture object visualisation alongside spatial skills, we can create ecologically richer contexts for both artistic and technical creativity – ultimately expanding how humans perceive, imagine, innovate, and shape the world.
5
Examining the Relationship Between Death Anxiety and Abstract Art
Death anxiety (DA)––the generalized fear of death and of one’s own mortality– while to a degree normal, can in extreme cases be detrimental to personal and societal health. High rates of DA are linked to depression, anxiety, even racism, leading to demands for better understanding and intervention. Terror Management Theory suggests that a phenomenon tied to DA may involve stimuli considered meaningless or ambiguous. Those high in DA may seek to avoid such situations as they may trigger unwanted DA ideations. Conversely, by helping individuals confront and accommodate DA-related ideations, such interactions, should then be encountered, could help ameliorate root psychological causes of DA itself. Interestingly, this potential dual connection to DA may be evoked by abstract art. By eschewing mimetic content, abstract art can often make individuals feel that they cannot understand, leading to an oft-identified distaste among the general public––a distaste also theoretically argued to potentially relate to DA. At the same time, higher appreciation for abstraction and ambiguity is often connected to those with more art exposure or interest and who could, perhaps, also show lower DA levels. We present first correlational evidence for these relations, via a survey of 197 participants constituting a distribution of art exposures, training, and work as artists. Results revealed significant correlations between lower DA levels and multiple art-related factors including art interest, knowledge, education, frequency of art making and arts visits, and appreciation of abstract art. A multiple regression, however, suggested that only liking abstract art, disliking representational art, and ‘need for meaning’ were significant predictors of DA, opening possibilities for future applications, experimental study, and intervention development.
6
From Decoding to Perceiving: Multimodal Brainwave Representations as Reflective Media
Research on creative thinking has increasingly moved beyond outcome assessment toward the perception of ongoing cognitive processes. Traditional studies of design cognition often use methods from neuroscience and cognitive psychology to measure and explain mental activity with precision. Less attention, however, has been paid to how such data may be made available to creators as perceptual material during the act of making. In this study, we approach thinking data generated in creative processes not only as a source of measurement, but as a perceptible and interactive medium for reflection. We present three exploratory design practices that translate EEG data into visual, auditory, and tactile representations, allowing participants to see, hear, and feel their brainwaves. The three practices examine thinking data through real-time feedback, cross-sensory translation, and retainable visual traces. Together, they explore how brainwave representations may shape creators’ self-perception and reflective engagement during creative activity. Guided by a perception-cognition-action framework, the findings suggest that brainwave representations do more than provide feedback. At the perceptual level, metaphorical audiovisual and tactile features made tacit changes in thinking perceptible, as participants read floating, clustering, trembling, or expanding patterns as drifting, focusing, blockage, or return to the task. At the cognitive level, the feedback acted as a meta-cognitive cue, prompting participants to reinterpret their creative state and decide whether to continue, pause, redirect, or adjust their rhythm. At the action level, participants did not merely receive the feedback, but moved between sensing it and attempting to control it. This oscillation could open new moments of creative reflection, while also introducing self-monitoring pressure and cognitive load during both short encounters and extended creative processes. By framing neurofeedback as reflective media, this study offers implications for real-time perception and interaction design oriented toward cognitive activity.
7
Reshaping Self-Perception Through First-Person Documentary Filmmaking: A Creative Practice for Wellbeing
Objective: To explore how first-person documentary filmmaking may function as a wellbeing practice that facilitates shifts in self-perception through processes of narrative externalisation, audiovisual editing, and multimodal meaning-making. Design and methods: This study adopts an arts-based methodology integrating first-person documentary filmmaking, narrative approaches, and iterative written reflections. An externalisation exercise from Narrative Therapy was also employed. The filmmaking process functioned as both a method of inquiry and a medium for mediating between subjective and objective perspectives. Results: A short film based on the externalisation exercise in Narrative Therapy was produced. Findings suggest that first-person documentary filmmaking can support the synthesis of lived experience, the externalisation of internalised discourses, and reflective processes that contribute to emotional processing and shifts in self-perception. Conclusions: The study highlights first-person documentary filmmaking as a qualitative research method and creative practice within mental health research, with potential to extend therapeutic approaches. By facilitating reflective engagement with subjective experience, the proposed approach can offer valuable insights into lived experience while supporting shifts in self-perception and the cultivation of empathy and self-compassion.
8
Affection for an Unknown Culture: Cross-Cultural Acculturation to Persian and European Artworks
This work investigates how cultural background and embodied engagement shape aesthetic responses to visual art, focusing on Persian and European dance-motif artworks from 1512 to 1920. A comparative analysis of 90 feminine-coded, body-centred artworks (45 Persian, 45 European) examined gesture, expression, composition, tonality, and colour structure of artworks across the four centuries. This qualitative study highlighted understudied aesthetic parallels between the two cultural spheres, while also underscoring the distinct visual languages and stylistic nuances of each culture. Building on this art historical analysis, two behavioural experiments explored how cultural familiarity and active engagement influence aesthetic judgment. In Experiment 1, a total of 110 Iranian and German participants rated Iranian and European artworks for familiarity, liking, and fascination. Iranian participants demonstrated stronger positive responses toward Iranian artworks, whereas both groups evaluated European artworks similarly. Experiment 2 tested whether cultural engagement could lead to acculturation effects in aesthetic judgments. Twenty-one culturally German participants completed a two-month online Iranian dance course (16 classes). Compared to a passive control group (17 German participants), pre-and post aesthetic judgments to Persian and European artworks showed that the embodied engagement in the Iranian dance tradition resulted in significant increases in familiarity, liking, and fascination for Iranian artworks, reaching levels comparable to those of Iranian participants in Experiment 1. Notably, these effects were specific to the Iranian artworks, with no pre-post changes in responses to European artworks. Participants seemed, quite literally, to develop affection for artworks from an unknown culture through the dance classes. By combining systematic art-historical analysis with behavioural experimentation, this work provides a methodological model for cross-cultural aesthetics, while also offering insights into how embodied experiences with a culture shape aesthetic judgment. The results elucidate the relevance of active cultural engagement in the context of current debates on acculturation in multicultural societies.
9
heART to heart: Prosocial Transformation Beyond the Museum. What happens to us when we live with an artwork for a month?
The arts are increasingly recognised as a potential vehicle for fostering prosocial attitudes and social cohesion in response to contemporary societal challenges, including international immigration. While interest in arts-based interventions spans policymaking, civic initiatives, and psychological research, the field remains limited by scarce empirical evidence and unresolved ethical concerns surrounding agency, representation, and researcher–participant relationships. As a result, the socially transformative impact of sustained, everyday engagement with art remains insufficiently understood. Grounded in an ethically and empirically informed Decolonial Executive Framework, this study examined how living with an artwork at home for one month influenced Viennese residents’ prosocial attitudes and behaviours towards international immigrant populations. In close collaboration with South Asian artists, I co-created a series of artworks expressing emotions related to migration and displacement. Each participant was randomly assigned one artwork, which was installed in their home for three weeks to enable prolonged, naturalistic engagement. Using an experience sampling methodology, participants completed brief daily smartphone surveys assessing mood, prosocial behaviours, social and moral emotions, and their perceived connection to the artwork and its artist. The study further investigated whether providing background information about the artist and their creative process shaped participants’ aesthetic experience, emotional engagement, and meaning making over time. In this talk, I present key findings from the study and reflect on ethical challenges inherent in psychological research involving marginalised stakeholders from migrant backgrounds and additionally underscore the importance of non-extractive research collaborations. I conclude by proposing a longitudinal, ecologically valid impact-assessment approach embedded in participants’ everyday lives. By moving beyond conventional museum-based studies reliant on brief, one-time encounters with art, this work offers a novel methodological framework for evaluating the prosocial potential of arts-based interventions in domestic settings.
10
From everyday ideas to artistic production: universal and domain-specific neurodynamics of creativity
Recent literature on neurocognitive aspects of the creative process proposes that it is supported by dynamic interactions between large-scale brain networks, particularly the Default Mode Network (DMN), Central Executive Network (CEN) and Salience Network (SN). However, these studies frequently employ different types of tasks that can be classified into distinct domains of creativity. Importantly, existing research tends to focus exclusively on single domains (e.g., everyday, artistic or scientific) and then compare the resulting brain activity with other studies investigating different creativity domains. As a result, there is a relative lack of direct, within-study comparisons that would systematically examine differences in neural activity across multiple domains of creativity. The main goal of the proposed project is to address this gap by comparing the activity of the CEN, DMN, and SN across different domains of creativity, specifically between everyday and artistic creativity. Our study aims to identify neural activity that is universal across various creative processes, while also examining domain-specific neural patterns. We combine EEG neuroimaging with behavioural tasks concerning everyday creativity (Alternative Uses Task) and artistic creativity (poetic composition), and a control task (verbal fluency). The study employs a within-subject design and aims to recruit at least 65 healthy young adults. We intend to apply microstate analysis to capture fast-changing large-scale brain network dynamics of neural activity patterns. The project is currently in the data collection phase; results will be available by the time of the conference.
11
Imaginative Substitution
In one experiment when subjects were instructed to imagine an object, they unexpectedly generated properties for background situations which mentally situated the object. These imaginative properties may presently be thought redolent of context creation via the spatial dorsal visual pathway. The ventral visual stream or “what pathway” governs object recognition; whereas the dorsal visual stream or “where” or the “how” pathway, is identified with spatial attention. Notably, the ventral pathway activity is significantly higher for consciously perceived stimuli, whereas the dorsal pathway activity is significantly less influenced by subjective stimulus awareness. Overlap especially within higher visual areas of visual perception and mental imagery is reported to occur among occipital areas wherein the ventral stream governs recognition of objects, and within the parietal lobe wherein the dorsal stream governs spatial processing, attention, and task completion. Visual information forms not linear but parallel distribution over flexible networks, after thalamic adaptation based upon behavioural states which may be subject to future interventions. Learned information is in fact stored in multiple thalamic, cortical, midbrain, and brainstem structures—to render visual memory more efficient and resilient. Neurotensin neuropeptide receptors in the amygdala are recently discovered to encode positive or negative emotional valence which is assigned to visual stimuli in the thalamus, which culminates in valence-specific plasticity relevant to behaviour. In a different experiment subjects viewed and later imagined painterly compositions in order to draw and thereby reconstruct them; people, animals, inanimate objects, and architecture seen within the painting were later equally represented schematically as figures in the drawings which populated imaginary spatial reconstructions. These figural elements were further demonstrated to represent these paintings via measurement of saccadic movement between figural objects. Therefore, imaginative substitution of dorsal contexts and ventral objects is presently hypothesized.
12
The Aesthetics of Association: How Creative Potential and Context Shape Art Appreciation Across Cultures
Research on creative cognition has focused on refining measurement tools to evaluate creative potential across diverse populations. The Remote Associates Test (RAT) is a measure of creative cognition, referring to the ability to form associations between disparate concepts. Although the linguistically oriented Compound RAT (cRAT) is widely used, its dependence on language proficiency often biases results toward native speakers. To address this, the present study utilises the Functional RAT (fRAT) and Visual RAT (vRAT), employing semantic distance as a numerical benchmark to calibrate item difficulty and validate new associative measures. This research aims to bridge the gap between creative potential and real-world creative behaviour through four primary inquiries. 1) It evaluates whether this new measurement method distinguishes creative potential based on individuals’ expertise and affinity for the arts. 2) It investigates the predictive validity of the tool by exploring whether measured creative potential directly influences actual creative activity. Furthermore, the study explores 3) how contextual framing and creative potential interact to shape aesthetic judgments during art appreciation. Finally, 4) a cross-cultural perspective is applied to examine variations between Eastern and Western perspectives in the formation of these judgments. By synthesising psychometric rigour with contextual and cultural inquiry, this research asserts that remote associations are not merely cognitive benchmarks but are fundamental to unraveling the complexities of art perception. The findings will move beyond theoretical discourse to provide a functional demonstration of which specific associative tools are most effective for empirical aesthetics. Thus, this research will offer a clear roadmap for utilising cognitive measures to understand how humans perceive beauty and generate meaning. Ultimately, this work underscores the essential role of associative processing in the experience of art, providing a refined methodology for future explorations into the universal nature of creativity.
13
AI Image Generators, Discrimination and Exclusion: Implications from Aesthetics for Social Work
Artificial intelligence is increasingly influencing professional fields such as Social Work, where questions of representation and discrimination are crucial. By linking this field with aesthetic evaluation and processing fluency, this contribution introduces an interdisciplinary approach to understand how stereotypes are visually constructed and perceived. Previous research focused mainly on comparing different AI models in regard to demographics and gender identity. Studies with affected marginalized groups are still rare. The present study aims at determining to what extent discrimination is reproduced by AI image generators in the life domain “Partnership”, and how this is linked to aesthetic evaluations. The research design builds on documented biases in AI models and integrates theoretical perspectives of processing fluency, social identity, and cognitive theory of emotion. A total of 76 participants (with and without discrimination experience) took part in an online survey assessing perceptions of discrimination, stereotypes, aesthetics and emotional responses to five image stimuli generated with DALL·E 3. The stimuli were constructed and evaluated in a pre-study. Questions comprised both scaled and open questions. The survey revealed that stereotypes are reproduced and even reinforced by visual design. Traditional ideas of partnership and family are overrepresented and normalized. The complex interplay of individual experiences and visual features of the images influence the perception of these stereotypes, resulting in the occasional implicit acceptance of discriminatory representation. When images are aesthetically pleasing, they receive more positive evaluations and emotional responses, even though discrimination is often conveyed implicitly through gender-stereotypical roles or context clues, highlighting aesthetics’ role in unconscious acceptance. If AI-generated images are used without further reflection in the context of Social Work, there is a risk of reproducing social inequality. Therefore, it is of utmost importance that social workers understand themselves as critical users of AI and are sensitized to the risks involved in its use.
14
Unidentified Call: Using an Aesthetic Experience to Probe How Real-time Generative Sound Constructs Felt Emotion in Human–AI Encounters
This poster presents Unidentified Call, an interactive installation and perception-oriented conversational prototype that investigates how real-time sonic orchestration shapes aesthetic experience, social perception, and reflective attitudes toward AI. The project begins from a question shared by cinema, game audio, and interface design: if sound editing organizes atmosphere, attention, and emotional pacing in time-based media, how might similar compositional strategies operate inside live conversation? A participant enters a three-minute phone call with an unseen presence. The interlocutor may be an AI agent or, in a two-site deployment, another remote participant connected through the same installation. This uncertainty is not used as a Turing-style task of correct identification; instead, it establishes an interpretive condition in which participants negotiate intimacy, hesitation, trust, and doubt within a single perceptual event. Technically, the system converts speech to text, interprets semantic and situational cues with a large language model, and transforms conversational context into a multitrack audio mix. Drawing on classification practices from film post-production and game sound design, it organizes TTS voice, Foley and effects, ambience and environmental sound, and background music as separate but coordinated layers. Literary scene elements extracted from dialogue are translated into real-time audio instructions, allowing TTS voice, SFX, BGM, and environmental textures to be dynamically orchestrated as a cinematic soundscape. The project therefore joins two levels of inquiry: sound as a perceptual interface that modulates presence, spatial imagination, temporal tension, and felt proximity; and identity ambiguity as a reflective framework for questioning what kind of relation is being formed with AI. By using aesthetic sound experience to probe these processes, the work proposes a design approach for multimodal interfaces in which immersion is not opposed to reflection, but becomes the condition through which emotional authenticity is sensed, questioned, and reimagined.
15
The role of visual complexity and image authorship in shaping aesthetic experience: a comparison of original and AI-modified art
As AI-modified artworks become increasingly common, understanding how viewers respond to them has become an important topic in empirical aesthetics. This project investigates how visual complexity and artwork origin, whether human-created or modified using artificial intelligence, affect viewers’ aesthetic experience. We also examine how these factors shape evaluations of beauty and intrigue. Seventy-one participants evaluated 16 abstract artworks, including originals and modified versions via Neural Style Transfer (NST) from an existing database (Geller et al., 2022). Repeated-measures MANOVA revealed significant main effects of complexity (ηp2= .48, p < .001) and authorship (ηp2= .57, p < .001) on aesthetic experience, as well as a significant interaction between these factors (ηp2= .38, p < .001). Follow-up ANOVAs showed that higher complexity increased both beauty and intrigue ratings, while the effect on beauty additionally depended on artwork authorship. Overall, more complex artworks elicited stronger aesthetic appreciation. Participants also rated original artworks higher than AI-modified images on selected dimensions of aesthetic experience, including perceptual organization, understanding of the artwork, and insight into the artist’s intention. Interestingly, in AI-modified images, higher complexity enhanced perceptual clarity, understanding, and perceived beauty. Together, these findings highlight complementary effects of visual complexity and artwork origin on subjective aesthetic experience.
16
How does information on the human-AI-co-creative process affect the aesthetic experience of the visual artworks? [Poster]
An increasing number of studies report that people’s aesthetic judgments change with information about the source of the artwork. While the labeling effect on the author of the artwork reveals significant insights into the reception and acceptability of the human-AI co-ccreated artworks, it is becoming more important to understand how the interaction and effort affect acceptability and the aesthetic experience of the co-created artworks. To gain insight into this, we investigate how bias against AI-generated artworks affects the aesthetic experience through background information about the process of making the artworks, using three interaction levels. At the first level, participants are informed that the artwork is generated with minimal human input; at the moderate level, they are informed that it is generated with moderate input, with refinement; and at the final level, they are informed that it is generated with extensive interaction with AI. Participants’ attitudes are measured using self-report measures of aesthetic liking and perceived beauty, creativity, self-relevance, meaning, and empathy toward the artwork’s author. Our preliminary results indicate that background information about the co-creative process affects how artworks are appreciated, including perceived beauty and meaning. In addition, transparency about the background information had an impact on the aesthetic liking and perceived creativity of the artwork, where the human-only versions are liked more and found to be more creative compared to the co-created artworks. The results have implications for acceptability regarding the effort of humans and AI in the co-creative process.
17
Perception-Informed Emotion Recognition: Attention-Driven Deep Learning via Visual Acoustic Representations of Musical Affect
The intersection of auditory perception and visual representation offers a compelling lens through which emotional experience can be computationally modelled. Music, as a temporally structured stimulus, encodes rich affective information within its spectral and harmonic architecture, information that becomes visually interpretable through acoustic representations such as Mel-Spectrograms, Chroma features, and Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs). This study proposes an Attention-Driven Deep Neural Network (ADNN) that leverages multi-view visual acoustic patterns to perform fine-grained musical emotion recognition, contributing to the growing intersection of perceptual science, aesthetic experience, and intelligent systems design. Grounded in the perceptual Mel scale, a frequency mapping that mirrors human auditory cognition, the proposed framework treats emotional classification as a visual pattern recognition problem. Audio signals are transformed into structured visual representations, in which spectral energy distributions, pitch-class progressions, and timbral textures are spatially encoded features that the model learns to interpret. Preprocessing steps, including signal normalisation, noise attenuation, and amplitude standardisation, ensure that the resulting visual representations are clean, consistent, and perceptually meaningful. The ADNN architecture integrates a dedicated attention mechanism that selectively weights the most emotionally salient regions within these acoustic visualisations, analogous to how human visual attention prioritises perceptually significant elements in a complex scene. This design philosophy aligns closely with empirical research in visual cognition, which shows that selective attention governs aesthetic perception and emotional response. The model was evaluated on a binary emotional classification task distinguishing Happy and Sad musical categories, drawn from a standardised audio dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that the ADNN achieves a classification accuracy of 90.01%, surpassing the state of the art by 1.23%. These findings highlight the potential of perception-informed, attention-guided deep learning architectures to bridge auditory and visual cognitive processes, offering scalable tools for emotion-aware design in human-computer interaction, well-being technologies, and affective computing environments.
18
The Architecture of Feeling: Sound, Image, and Emotional Synchronization in Neurocinematics
Cinema is often approached primarily as a visual medium, yet emotional perception in film frequently emerges through the tension and collaboration between sound, image, memory, and embodied spectatorship. Drawing from neurocinematic theory, intersubject correlation (ISC), and my own filmmaking practice across narrative and sports cinema, this presentation explores how sound design can function as a form of perceptual architecture—guiding emotional synchronization, sensory immersion, and collective attention across viewers. The presentation examines how layered sonic environments, reverberation, diegetic fragmentation, rhythm, and memory-based sound construction can shape affective experience before cognition fully organizes image. Particular focus is placed on how sound and image work together to influence spectatorship not only emotionally, but bodily: through tension, anticipation, sensory recall, and the subtle choreography of attention itself. Positioned between neuroaesthetics and cinematic practice, the talk considers how contemporary filmmaking techniques may mimic processes of consciousness, memory retrieval, and emotional recall. Referencing work in experimental sports filmmaking and narrative cinema, I explore how spectatorship can operate as an embodied and collective experience—one shaped as much by sonic texture and perceptual rhythm as by narrative structure alone.
19
Color Reproduction Fairness in AI Image Generation: A Study on Korean Minhwa
This study investigated color reproduction fairness in AI-generated images by examining how traditional color structures were transformed during image generation. While recent generative AI systems produced visually convincing images, questions remained regarding whether category-based color identity and perceptual consistency were faithfully preserved. In this study, color reproduction fairness was defined as the degree to which generated colors maintained perceptual consistency and prototypical color identity within human color categories. The study focused on Korean Minhwa, a traditional folk painting style characterized by vivid chromatic contrasts, decorative patterns, flattened compositions, and clear line structures. These visual characteristics made Minhwa an appropriate case for analyzing transformations in AI-generated imagery. A set of Korean Minhwa paintings was collected as reference images, and AI-generated images were produced using prompts and multiple reference images. The analysis focused on chroma variation, color distribution, and edge sharpness in order to examine whether high-saturation color structures and line details were maintained during image generation. The results showed that AI-generated images tended to exhibit reduced chroma and weakened color identity compared to the reference images. In addition, line structures and decorative details were partially degraded during image generation. These phenomena could be interpreted as outcomes of statistical averaging processes in data-driven image generation, where variations in image resolution and compressed reference image quality influenced the preservation of color structures and line details. The findings suggested that human color category structures provided a meaningful framework for evaluating AI-generated visual reproduction.