ArticleAttention, perception & psychophysics2022
Aesthetic appeal influences visual search performance.
Article in Attention, perception & psychophysics, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Usability evaluation of a Halal Food Tracer information system using ISO 25023 and UWIS models.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Aesthetic preference and gaze-based visual attention in atlas-cover design: Evidence from an eye-tracking study.PloS one · 2026Article
- Practice makes perfect, especially when doing what we like.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2025Article
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2 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
Aesthetic appeal of a visual image can influence performance in time-critical tasks, even if it is irrelevant to the task. This series of experiments examined whether aesthetic appeal can act as an object attribute that guides visual search. If appeal enhances the salience of the targets pre-attentively, then appealing icons would lead to more efficient searches than unappealing targets and, conversely, appeal of distractors would reduce search efficiency. Three experiments (N = 112) examined how aesthetic appeal influences performance in a classic visual search task. In each experiment, participants completed 320 visual search trials, with icons varying in rated aesthetic appeal and either visual complexity (Experiments 1 and 2) of concreteness (Experiment 3) among two, four, eight, or 11 distractor icons. While target appeal did not influence search efficiency it sped up search times in all three experiments: appealing targets led to faster response time (RT) than unappealing targets across all experiments, and compared to neutral distractors, appealing distractors slowed search RT down. These findings are the first to show that an object's aesthetic appeal influences visual search performance.
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