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Abstract:
Can observers keep track of each pleasure, while enjoying several? In everyday life, images are rarely isolated. Yet, experiments on aesthetic pleasure usually present only one image at a time. Here we ask whether people can reliably report the pleasure of an image even if another image is presented simultaneously and both need to be attended. Participants (N = 13) viewed 36 OASIS images that uniformly span the entire range of pleasure (from very unpleasant to very pleasant) and beauty (from none to very intense). On each trial, the observer simultaneously saw two side-by-side images for 200 ms. A cue (randomly left or right) indicated which image the observer should report the pleasure of (target) while ignoring the other (distractor). In half the blocks, the cue came before the images, and in the other half, it came after. Pre-cueing allows the observer to selectively attend to just the target, while post-cueing demands attention to both images. At the end of the experiment, we obtain baseline pleasure ratings by showing only one image at a time. We model the pre- and post-cued pleasure report as a weighted average of baseline target and distractor pleasure. The data are best explained by a target weight of 1. We obtained accurate selective reports with both pre- and post-cueing, showing that people can encode and report the pleasure of each image while attending to both.
