Trial reportProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2013
Impact of contour on aesthetic judgments and approach-avoidance decisions in architecture.
Trial report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 89 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
89 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Toward evidence-based neuroarchitecture: a systematic mapping and framework for immersive spatial cognition.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Pooled it
- How universal is preference for visual curvature? A systematic review and meta-analysis.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2022Pooled it
- Seeking the "Beauty Center" in the Brain: A Meta-Analysis of fMRI Studies of Beautiful Human Faces and Visual Art.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2020Pooled it
- Effects of the Visual Character of Transitional Spaces on Human Stress Recovery in a Virtual Reality Environment.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Trial
- Morphological Buffering in Neuro-Architecture: Interactive Effects of Color, Shape, and Area Proportion on Affective Processing.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Whole-Brain Fractional Anisotropy, Centered on the Superior Longitudinal Fasciculus, Is Positively Correlated With Urban Aesthetic Perception.Brain and behavior · 2026Article
- The Minimum Semantic Content (MSC) Dataset: A Large, Balanced Resource for Computational Aesthetics Research.Scientific data · 2026Article
- Informing the redesign of psychiatric seclusion rooms: a mixed-methods pre-evaluation with individuals with lived experience.BMC psychiatry · 2026Article
- A design-integrated framework for neuroarchitectural research.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Structural nodal efficiency in executive-function-related regions moderates individual and paired-player creativity.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Less is more: Aesthetic liking is inversely related to metabolic expense by the visual system.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Interactive room design as a tool for understanding form and style preferences.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Cognitive efficiency in VR simulated natural indoor environments examined through EEG and affective responses.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The Interplay Between Environment and Drug Effects: Decoding the Ecocebo Phenomenon with Virtual Technologies.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- The impact of negative emotions on product purchase decisions: a study of watch design.BMC psychology · 2025Article
- Equation for Attractiveness: Integrating Multidimensional Factors Through Computational Neuroaesthetics.Aesthetic plastic surgery · 2025Article
- The 7 Muses of Neuro-Creative Cycle: How some patients with Parkinson's disease can unleash latent creativity.AIMS neuroscience · 2025Article
- Empirical aesthetics of bridges.PloS one · 2025Article
- Preference differences of different styles of oil paintings in various interior environments based on the PAD emotional state model and EEG.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- The edge orientation entropy of natural scenes is associated with infant visual preferences and adult aesthetic judgements.PloS one · 2025Article
29 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
On average, we urban dwellers spend about 90% of our time indoors, and share the intuition that the physical features of the places we live and work in influence how we feel and act. However, there is surprisingly little research on how architecture impacts behavior, much less on how it influences brain function. To begin closing this gap, we conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging study to examine how systematic variation in contour impacts aesthetic judgments and approach-avoidance decisions, outcome measures of interest to both architects and users of spaces alike. As predicted, participants were more likely to judge spaces as beautiful if they were curvilinear than rectilinear. Neuroanatomically, when contemplating beauty, curvilinear contour activated the anterior cingulate cortex exclusively, a region strongly responsive to the reward properties and emotional salience of objects. Complementing this finding, pleasantness--the valence dimension of the affect circumplex--accounted for nearly 60% of the variance in beauty ratings. Furthermore, activation in a distributed brain network known to underlie the aesthetic evaluation of different types of visual stimuli covaried with beauty ratings. In contrast, contour did not affect approach-avoidance decisions, although curvilinear spaces activated the visual cortex. The results suggest that the well-established effect of contour on aesthetic preference can be extended to architecture. Furthermore, the combination of our behavioral and neural evidence underscores the role of emotion in our preference for curvilinear objects in this domain.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.