美感对西方绘画无意识加工的影响

People prefer beautiful visual artworks. Aesthetic experiences to beautiful and ugly images are different. Studies on neuroaesthetics showed different neural responses to beautiful stimuli compared to ugly stimuli. The first stage of aesthetic experience of a visual artwork is visual perception of the stimulus. Most research about aesthetic processing focused on stimuli presented consciously. Little is known about whether aesthetic processing can occur unconsciously. Previous research suggested that both beautiful paintings and attractive faces can elicit activation of the reward circuitry in our brain. Attractive faces break through continuous flash suppression more quickly than unattractive faces. Thus, it is possible that unconscious processing of beautiful paintings is different from that of less beautiful paintings. In two experiments, the present study adopted continuous flash suppression paradigm to investigate whether aesthetic ratings of western paintings influenced the time for stimuli to break suppression. We also compared the suppression effect of achromatic (Experiment 1) and chromatic (Experiment 2) noise pictures.