An Experimental Aesthetics of Orienting

1 Looking, liking and locating: an experimental aesthetics of orienting 2 3 Mariana Babo-Rebelo, Eoin Travers, Patrick Haggard 4 Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London 5 6 Corresponding author: Mariana Babo-Rebelo ([email protected]) 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Author contributions 15 MBR and PH designed tHe study. MBR and ET programmed tHe study. MBR, ET and PH 16 analyzed the data and wrote the paper. 17 18 19 1 20 Abstract 21 Memory for object location has been extensively studied, but little is known about the role 22 of subjective evaluation of objects. We investigated how aesthetic experience could incidentally 23 modulate memory of location. 96 participants (86 tested at science festivals, 10 at the laboratory) 24 visited a virtual museum, not knowing they would later be tested on spatial memory. Afterwards, 25 they reported how much they liked each painting, and located it on the museum map. Participants 26 remembered better the location of paintings that created strong aesthetic experiences, whether 27 positive or negative, suggesting an arousal effect. Liking a painting increased the ability to recall 28 on which wall the painting was hung. Since recalling the wall requires recalling heading direction, 29 this finding suggests positive aesthetic experience enhances first-person spatial representations. 30 Aesthetic experience of stimuli can shape the cognitive map. These results may have implications 31 for museum design. 32 33 34 Statement of significance 35 Remembering a seen object often involves remembering its location. How is this 36 influenced by the experience we have of the object? We investigated the particular case of 37 aesthetic experience in a museum setting. How do we remember the location of paintings we saw? 38 Is this influenced by our aesthetic experience? We here show that we can remember the location 39 of paintings that created a strong aesthetic experience, whether positive or negative, even if we 40 were not paying attention to their spatial locations while visiting the museum. Moreover, liking a 41 painting enhances a first-person representation of space. These results reveal that aesthetic 42 experience is incidentally accompanied by a representation of the surrounding space. Our 43 memory of object locations is thus shaped by our experience of these objects, even when there is 44 no direct link with survival behaviors. The resulting individual shaping of spatial maps may have 45 important implications for museum design. 46 47 Acknowledgments 48 MBR was funded by a Fyssen Foundation post-doctoral grant. ET was funded by a 49 Leverhulme Trust Research Project grant to PH (RPG-2016-378). The authors thank the team who 50 helped with data collection (Antonio Cataldo, Damiano Azzalini, David Wurzer, Davide Bono, 51 Elisabeth Parés-Pujolràs, Gaiqing Kong, Irena Arslanova, Ivan Ezquerra Romano, Karla Matic, 52 Michael Clements), the organizers of the festivals (Tate Modern ‘Moving Humans’ festival: 53 organized by the Institute of Philosophy and funded by the AHRC Science in Culture theme; UCL 54 ‘It’s All Academic Festival’), and Andrej Bicanski, Nathalie George and Aina Puce for helpful 55 discussion. 2 56 Introduction 57 58 Perceiving an object in tHe world is an experience defined in space and time, and 59 stored in memory witH tHis contextual information. Memory for object-location 60 associations Has been extensively studied in the spatial cognition literature (EicHenbaum, 61 2017; Epstein et al., 2017; Manns & EicHenbaum, 2009; Postma et al., 2008), but little is 62 known about the interplay between subjective aspects of experience and spatial 63 representation. We here investigated how aesthetic experience of an object affects the 64 representation of that object’s spatial location. 65 Previous studies link affect to spatial memory in animals (Moita et al., 2003; 66 WystracH et al., 2020) and Humans. For example, spatial context of emotional and 67 arousing stimuli, sucH as emotional words (D’Argembeau & Van der Linden, 2004; 68 MacKay & Ahmetzanov, 2005) or pictures (MatHer & NesmitH, 2008; ScHmidt et al., 2011), 69 is better recalled than for neutral stimuli. Similar results were obtained in 3D 70 environments, wHere emotional landmarks improved spatial memory (Balaban et al., 71 2017; Brunyé et al., 2009; CHan et al., 2012, p. 201; Palmiero & Piccardi, 2017; Ruotolo et 72 al., 2019). However, these tasks generally instructed participants to attend to space and 73 considered objects as landmarks. Little is known about incidental spatial encoding during 74 navigation, and How it migHt be influenced by tHe experience of objects encountered en 75 route. 76 We tested these questions using an onscreen virtual museum as a setting (Fig. 1a). 77 Museums provide an interesting setting for studying tHe interplay between experience 78 and spatial representation, because tHey implicitly impose spatial constraints on aestHetic 79 experience. The gallery space needs to be navigated even if not attended to, and specific 80 aesthetic experiences are clearly linked to the spatial location of the displayed objects. 81 In tHis experiment, participants visited a museum, eitHer actively leading the visit, 82 or passively following another visitor, with the sole instruction of evaluating the works of 83 art that they saw (i.e., aesthetic attitude, (Leder et al., 2015)). Afterwards, participants 84 were represented witH tHe paintings, reported tHeir liking for tHem, and recalled their 85 location on tHe museum map (Fig. 1b). 86 We investigated tHe cognitive mecHanisms linking aestHetic experience of a 87 painting to memory for its location. Drawing on Osgood’s “semantic differential” approacH 88 (Snider & Osgood, 1969), we considered two cardinal aspects dominating aestHetic 3 89 experience: the participants’ liking for each painting (valence) and the intensity of 90 experience independent of valence (potency). A tHird aspect of Osgood’s tHeory, namely 91 tHe extent to wHicH an object implies agency is less relevant here. We also distinguished 92 two different aspects of the museum’s spatial environment (Fig. 1a), e.g. exHibition rooms 93 (first to fourth) and hanging walls (left, front or right wall relative to the entrance door) 94 (Marchette et al., 2014). We considered that these are associated with two distinct ways 95 of remembering spatial locations. Correctly reporting tHe room wHere a painting was 96 displayed involves recalling the ordinal location of the painting within the progressive 97 sequence of the visit, e.g. first room, second room etc. THis migHt correspond to a count- 98 based or travel-based representation of space. Conversely, recalling whether a painting 99 appeared on the left, front or right wall involves accessing first-person perspective 100 heading information relative to tHe local environment. We therefore looked at how 101 aestHetic experience could explain memory for tHe room location or wall location of 102 paintings. 103 104 105 106 Fig. 1. Museum setting and paradigm. a, Museum map and view of the environment. The 107 virtual museum was composed of four successive exhibition rooms with 3 paintings, one on the left, 108 one on the front and one on the right wall relative to the entrance door. b, Paradigm. After the visit, 109 participants complete the test, where the 12 paintings and 3 catch are presented. Participants report 110 whether they had previously seen the painting or not. If they respond ‘yes’, they rate their liking of 111 the painting (‘Liking ratings’), and then drag and drop the painting to its location in the museum 112 map (‘Spatial memory task’). 113 114 4 115 Method 116 117 Participants 118 134 participants volunteered to take part in this study, in three different contexts: 119 at tHe laboratory (n=10), at a neuroscience festival at tHe Tate Modern museum in London 120 (n=87), and at a science festival at University College London (n=37). 34 participants were 121 excluded at tHe time of testing, due to difficulties witH navigation, major distractions 122 during task performance or interference from audience. Four participants were excluded 123 at tHe memory screening stage, recognizing less than 33% of paintings previously seen. 124 96 participants were included in tHe main analyses (Supplementary Table; gender: 46 125 males, 45 females, 5 preferred not to answer; age: mean = 35.4, SD = 14.7, min = 9, max = 126 72). We did not set a minimal sample size for tHis study, as tHe experiment was designed 127 to be tested witH large numbers of participants at public events. THe following analyses 128 were performed once tHe wHole dataset Had been collected. All procedures were 129 approved by the appropriate local etHics committee for the data collection setting. 130 131 The virtual environment 132 THe virtual environment consisted of a museum, composed successively of an 133 entrance room, four exHibition rooms and an exit room. Rooms were separated by doors. 134 We created three types of exhibition rooms, which differed depending on the position of 135 tHe exit door: tHe exit door could be on tHe rigHt wall as one entered tHe exHibition room, 136 on the wall in front of the entrance door, or there could be two exit doors on the wall in 137 front of the entrance door1. We created 6 different layouts for tHe museum as a wHole 138 (Supplementary Fig. 1), resulting from tHe concatenation of four of tHese exHibition rooms 139 in different order. EacH exHibition room presented tHree paintings, one on tHe left wall, 140 one on the front wall, and one on the right wall relative to the entrance door. We collected 141 a total of 15 abstract paintings. Twelve paintings were presented in eacH museum, 142 randomized between museums, and in randomized rooms and walls. 143 The virtual environment was implemented witH Unity (version 2019.1.10f1, Unity 144 TecHnologies, CA, USA).

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