ABSTRACT

Judgments of liking and beauty appear to be expressions of a common hedonic state, but they differ in how they engage cognitive processes. We hypothesised that beauty judgments place greater demands on limited executive resources than judgments of liking. We tested this hypothesis by asking two groups of participants to judge works of visual art for their beauty or liking while having to remember the location of 1, 3, or 5 dots in a 4 by 4 matrix. We also examined the effect of individual differences in working memory capacity. Our results show that holding information about the location of the dots in working memory delayed judgments of beauty but not of liking. Also, the greater participants’ working memory capacity, the faster they completed the working memory task when judging liking, but not when judging beauty. Our study provides evidence that judging beauty draws more on working memory resources than judging liking.

摘要

喜好和美丽的判断似乎是一种常见的享乐状态的表达，但它们在如何参与认知过程方面有所不同。我们假设美貌判断比喜好判断对有限的执行资源提出了更高的要求。我们通过要求两组参与者判断视觉艺术作品的美感或喜好来测试这一假设，同时必须记住 4 x 4 矩阵中 1、3 或 5 个点的位置。我们还研究了个体差异对工作记忆容量的影响。我们的结果表明，在工作记忆中保存有关点位置的信息会延迟对美的判断，但不会延迟对喜欢的判断。此外，参与者的工作记忆容量越大，他们在判断喜欢时完成工作记忆任务的速度就越快，但在判断美时则不然。