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Electrophysiological correlates of aesthetic processing of webpages: a comparison of experts and laypersons

We investigated whether design experts or laypersons evaluate webpages differently. Twenty participants, 10 experts and 10 laypersons, judged the aesthetic value of a webpage in an EEG-experiment. Screenshots of 150 webpages, judged as aesthetic or as unaesthetic by another 136 participants, served...

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Autores principales: Bölte, Jens, Hösker, Thomas M., Hirschfeld, Gerrit, Thielsch, Meinald T.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: PeerJ Inc. 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5463973/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28603676
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.3440
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author Bölte, Jens
Hösker, Thomas M.
Hirschfeld, Gerrit
Thielsch, Meinald T.
author_facet Bölte, Jens
Hösker, Thomas M.
Hirschfeld, Gerrit
Thielsch, Meinald T.
author_sort Bölte, Jens
collection PubMed
description We investigated whether design experts or laypersons evaluate webpages differently. Twenty participants, 10 experts and 10 laypersons, judged the aesthetic value of a webpage in an EEG-experiment. Screenshots of 150 webpages, judged as aesthetic or as unaesthetic by another 136 participants, served as stimulus material. Behaviorally, experts and laypersons evaluated unaesthetic webpages similarly, but they differed in their evaluation of aesthetic ones: experts evaluated aesthetic webpages as unaesthetic more often than laypersons did. The ERP-data show main effects of level of expertise and of aesthetic value only. There was no interaction of expertise and aesthetics. In a time-window of 110–130 ms after stimulus onset, aesthetic webpages elicited a more negative EEG-amplitude than unaesthetic webpages. In the same time window, experts had more negative EEG-amplitudes than laypersons. This patterning of results continued until a time window of 600–800 ms in which group and aesthetic differences diminished. An interaction of perceiver characteristics and object properties that several interactionist theories postulate was absent in the EEG-data. Experts seem to process the stimuli in a more thorough manner than laypersons. The early activation differences between aesthetic and unaesthetic webpages is in contrast with some theories of aesthetic processing and has not been reported before.
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spelling pubmed-54639732017-06-09 Electrophysiological correlates of aesthetic processing of webpages: a comparison of experts and laypersons Bölte, Jens Hösker, Thomas M. Hirschfeld, Gerrit Thielsch, Meinald T. PeerJ Neuroscience We investigated whether design experts or laypersons evaluate webpages differently. Twenty participants, 10 experts and 10 laypersons, judged the aesthetic value of a webpage in an EEG-experiment. Screenshots of 150 webpages, judged as aesthetic or as unaesthetic by another 136 participants, served as stimulus material. Behaviorally, experts and laypersons evaluated unaesthetic webpages similarly, but they differed in their evaluation of aesthetic ones: experts evaluated aesthetic webpages as unaesthetic more often than laypersons did. The ERP-data show main effects of level of expertise and of aesthetic value only. There was no interaction of expertise and aesthetics. In a time-window of 110–130 ms after stimulus onset, aesthetic webpages elicited a more negative EEG-amplitude than unaesthetic webpages. In the same time window, experts had more negative EEG-amplitudes than laypersons. This patterning of results continued until a time window of 600–800 ms in which group and aesthetic differences diminished. An interaction of perceiver characteristics and object properties that several interactionist theories postulate was absent in the EEG-data. Experts seem to process the stimuli in a more thorough manner than laypersons. The early activation differences between aesthetic and unaesthetic webpages is in contrast with some theories of aesthetic processing and has not been reported before. PeerJ Inc. 2017-06-06 /pmc/articles/PMC5463973/ /pubmed/28603676 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.3440 Text en ©2017 Bölte et al. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
spellingShingle Neuroscience
Bölte, Jens
Hösker, Thomas M.
Hirschfeld, Gerrit
Thielsch, Meinald T.
Electrophysiological correlates of aesthetic processing of webpages: a comparison of experts and laypersons
title Electrophysiological correlates of aesthetic processing of webpages: a comparison of experts and laypersons
title_full Electrophysiological correlates of aesthetic processing of webpages: a comparison of experts and laypersons
title_fullStr Electrophysiological correlates of aesthetic processing of webpages: a comparison of experts and laypersons
title_full_unstemmed Electrophysiological correlates of aesthetic processing of webpages: a comparison of experts and laypersons
title_short Electrophysiological correlates of aesthetic processing of webpages: a comparison of experts and laypersons
title_sort electrophysiological correlates of aesthetic processing of webpages: a comparison of experts and laypersons
topic Neuroscience
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5463973/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28603676
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.3440
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