Your Ears Don’t Change What Your Eyes Like: People Can Independently Report The Pleasure Of Music And Images

Abstract

Observers can make independent aesthetic judgments of at least two images presented briefly and simultaneously. However, it is unknown whether this is the case for two stimuli of different sensory modalities. Here, we investigated whether individuals can judge auditory and visual stimuli independently, and whether stimulus duration influences such judgments. Participants (N=120, across two experiments and a replication) sawimages of paintings and heard excerpts ofmusic, presented simultaneously for 2 s (Experiment 1) or 5 s (Experiment 2). After the stimuli were presented, participants rated howmuch pleasure they felt fromthe stimulus (music, image, or combined pleasure of both, depending on which was cued) on a 9-point scale. Finally, participants completed a baseline rating block where they rated each stimulus in isolation.We used the baseline ratings to predict ratings of audiovisual presentations. Across both experiments, the root mean square errors (RMSEs) obtained from leave-one-out-cross-validation analyses showed that people's ratings of music and images were unbiased by the simultaneously presented other stimulus, and ratings of both were best described as the arithmetic mean of the ratings from the individual presentations at the end of the experiment. This pattern of results replicates previous findings on simultaneously presented images, indicating that participants can ignore the pleasure of an irrelevant stimulus regardless of the sensory modality and duration of stimulus presentation.

Department(s)

Psychological Science

Comments

National Institutes of Health, Grant R15AG075609

Keywords and Phrases

aesthetics; music; pleasure; reward

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

1939-1277; 0096-1523

Document Type

Article - Journal

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2023 American Psychological Association, All rights reserved.

Publication Date

01 Jan 2023

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