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Aesthetic appreciation is modulated by emotional valence, psychological and physical distance of visual images

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 5:00 – 7:00 pm PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Tzu-Hsin Hsu¹ (), Denise Hsien Wu²; ¹Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, National Central University, Taiwan

Previous research associates N1 and LPP components of event-related potentials (ERPs) to emotional processing, with both psychological and physical distance modulated the magnitude of these components. Although the same components are implicated in aesthetic appreciation, with N1 reflecting automatic perceptual discrimination and LPP reflecting emotional salience and evaluative attention, it remains unclear whether the ERP effects observed in aesthetic evaluations are mediated by emotional valence, and whether psychological and physical distance has the same effects on perceived aesthetics reflected in subjective liking. To address these questions, 22 participants were recruited to view realistic photographs (psychologically close) and their AI-transformed artistic counterparts (psychologically distant), while simultaneous recordings of the ERPs elicited by individual images were collected, focusing on early (N1) and late (LPP) components. Participants’ subjective ratings of their liking of individual images revealed preferences for positive over negative valence, for art images over photographs, and for medium- over small-sized images. Despite significant correlation between subjective valence ratings and liking ratings, ERP results demonstrated dissociable and interactive effects between them. Specifically, magnitude of N1 positively correlated with liking but negatively with valence. For magnitude of LPP, it positively correlated with liking of positive images but negatively correlated with liking of negative images. On the other hand, physical distance negatively correlated with both N1 and LPP, but psychological distance positively correlated with LPP. In summary, the present results identified the neurophysiological correlates of subjective liking of visual images, whose magnitude was also modulated by valence, psychological distance, and perceived physical distance interactively.

Topic Area: PERCEPTION & ACTION: Vision