Your Ears Don't Change What Your Eyes Like: People Can Independently Report the Pleasure of Music and Images

• Published in: Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance 2023-06, Vol.49 (6), p.774-785
• Main Authors: Frame, Jessica, Gugliano, Maria, Bai, Elena, Brielmann, Aenne, Belfi, Amy M.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Aesthetics; Arithmetic; Auditory Perception; Ears; Emotions; Esthetics; Female; Human; Humans; Judgment; Male; Music; Pleasure; Ratings & rankings; Sensory integration; Stimulus; Visual stimuli
• ISSN: 0096-1523; 1939-1277
• DOI: 10.1037/xhp0001118

Observers can make independent aesthetic judgments of at least two images presented briefly and simultaneously. However, it is unknown whether this is the case for two stimuli of different sensory modalities. Here, we investigated whether individuals can judge auditory and visual stimuli independently, and whether stimulus duration influences such judgments. Participants (N = 120, across two experiments and a replication) saw images of paintings and heard excerpts of music, presented simultaneously for 2 s (Experiment 1) or 5 s (Experiment 2). After the stimuli were presented, participants rated how much pleasure they felt from the stimulus (music, image, or combined pleasure of both, depending on which was cued) on a 9-point scale. Finally, participants completed a baseline rating block where they rated each stimulus in isolation. We used the baseline ratings to predict ratings of audiovisual presentations. Across both experiments, the root mean square errors (RMSEs) obtained from leave-one-out-cross-validation analyses showed that people's ratings of music and images were unbiased by the simultaneously presented other stimulus, and ratings of both were best described as the arithmetic mean of the ratings from the individual presentations at the end of the experiment. This pattern of results replicates previous findings on simultaneously presented images, indicating that participants can ignore the pleasure of an irrelevant stimulus regardless of the sensory modality and duration of stimulus presentation. Public Significance Statement This study suggests that people are able to make independent judgments of stimuli in their environment, for example, that a person can accurately judge how much they like a painting even if listening to a song they dislike.