The Aesthetic Preferences Of Visual Stimuli Analogous To Chinese Characters

In daily life, we use "beauty" or "ugly" to evaluate the assessment for the objects so that the scale of beauty is visible result of our aesthetic experience. A lot of studies show that aesthetic experiences are influenced by a variety of factors such as object-related elements and self-related elements. The former one includes color, complexity, orientation and contrast etc. The latter one includes age, cognitive style, professional level and personal experiences etc. In addition, environment and culture play an important role in aesthetic preferences. For the psychological mechanism of aesthetic experience, Leder's information processing model seems to be complete and rational. Input, processing and output constitute three parts of the model. The middle part is composed by cognitive and affective functions which are interactive.Experimental materials used in researches about aesthetic preference mostly were geometry, art works and photography. However, Chinese characters belong to ideographs which have the feature like graphics. Then, whether the Chinese characters structures compliance with the laws of visual beauty? This problem is explored in this study through three experiments.Experimentâ… aims to validate the impact of the number of strokes, orthography and symmetry whose stimulus presented one by one. The results show that all these three factors have significant influences on aesthetic preference. Characters which directed to "right" or fitted orthography are preferred. In addition, the symmetry of LVF may be more important than that of RVF. Among three variables, orthography is the most important one, orientation is the second one and sysmmetry is the smallest factor.Experimentâ…¡examines the same three variables as experiment I but whose stimulus presented by pairs. The results about the number of strokes and orthography correspond to the results in experimentâ… . However sysmmetry has no significant impact on aesthetic preference in experimentâ…¡. According to these results, it seems that the change of presentation mode maybe will weaken the aesthetic experience.In Experimentâ…¢, the study focuses on the implicit aesthetic attitudes of subjects who have diverse cognitive styles. The results indicate that subjects with field independent have a steady implicit attitude about orientation differences of character structure.In conclusion, the aesthetic preferences of charaters accord with common visual aesthetic rules. The effects can be explained from two aspects which are the laterality of cognitive processing and the laterality of affection processing. So the results of this study tend to support the hypothesis that aesthetic experience refers to the differences between two hemispheres on cognitive-emotional processing. Moreover, this research could lead out a question that whether orthography fits the law of beauty. Then the answer of the question needs further studys.