Investigating the role of working memory resources across aesthetic and non-aesthetic judgements

Aesthetic judgements dominate much of daily life by guiding how we evaluate objects, people, and experiences in our environment. One key question that remains unanswered is the extent to which more specialised or largely general cognitive resources support aesthetic judgements. To investigate this question in the context of working memory, we examined the extent to which a working memory load produces similar or different response time interference on aesthetic compared with non-aesthetic judgements. Across three pre-registered experiments that used Bayesian multi-level modelling approaches (N > 100 per experiment), we found clear evidence that a working memory load produces similar response time interference on aesthetic judgements relative to non-aesthetic (motion) judgements. We also showed that this similarity in processing across aesthetic versus non-aesthetic judgements holds across variations in the form of art (people vs. landscape; Experiments 1–3), medium type (artwork vs. photographs; Experiment 2), and load content (art images vs. letters; Experiments 1–3). These findings suggest that across a range of experimental contexts, as well as different processing streams in working memory (e.g., visual vs. verbal), aesthetic and motion judgements commonly rely on a domain-general cognitive system, rather than a system that is more specifically tied to aesthetic judgements. In doing so, these findings shine new light on the working memory resources that support aesthetic judgements, as well as on how domain-general cognitive systems operate more generally in cognition.