title: The spatial frequencies influence the aesthetic judgment of buildings transculturally.
abstract: Recent evidence has shown that buildings designed to be high-ranking, according to the Western architectural decorum, have more impact on the minds of their beholders than low-ranking buildings. Here we investigated whether and how the aesthetic judgment for high- and low-ranking buildings was affected by differences in cultural expertise and by power spectrum differences. A group of Italian and Japanese participants performed aesthetic judgment tasks, with line drawings of high- and low-ranking buildings and with their random-phase versions (an image with the exact power spectrum of the original one but non-recognizable anymore). Irrespective of cultural expertise, high-ranking buildings and their relative random-phase versions received higher aesthetic judgments than low-ranking buildings and their random-phase versions. These findings indicate that high- and low-ranking buildings are differentiated for their aesthetic value and they show that low-level visual processes influence the aesthetic judgment based on differences in the stimuli power spectrum, irrespective of the influence of cultural expertise.
authors.affiliation: a Department of NEUROFARBA- Section of Psychology , University of Florence , Firenze , Italy.
authors.forename: Manila
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Vannucci
authors.forename: Simone
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Gori
authors.forename: Haruyuki
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Kojima
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001108:Architecture; D060389:Construction Industry; D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D004954:Esthetics / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007558:Italy / Q000208:ethnology; D007564:Japan / Q000208:ethnology; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D065855:Spatial Processing; D014796:Visual Perception; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Aesthetic judgment; Architecture; Decorum. ; Visual aesthetic perception; Visual processing