Helmut Leder

• Prof. Dr.
• University of Vienna

Urban human-made environments present a range of potential benefits for wellbeing through their design. However, there is a lack of comprehensive organization on this topic. To this end, we performed a scoping review to provide an overview of how the urban environment, particularly its designed components, has been previously studied in relation to...

Colour plays an important role in the sighted world, not only by guiding and warning, but also by helping to make decisions, form opinions, and influence emotional landscape. While not everyone has direct access to this information, even people without colour vision (i.e., blind, achromatope) understand the meanings of colour terms and can assign s...

In museums and art galleries, visitors become less engaged per object over time. This study, comprising a pre-study (N = 31) and a main study (N = 73) in both laboratory and online settings, explores habituation as a potential cause. The primary aim is to reveal the underlying mechanism and propose strategies for its mitigation. Two research questi...

Art has proven be an asset in maintaining and enhancing our wellbeing. Following a recent field study, the present laboratory investigation assessed whether and to what extent an interaction with art in urban public spaces can positively impact experienced wellbeing. Participants watched videos simulating an interaction with a parking-lot-sized int...

While cities are attractive places, brimming with opportunities and possibilities for their inhabitants, they have also been found to have negative consequences, especially on physical and mental health. In a world of ever-growing urban populations, it is important to understand how to make cities healthier and more pleasant places to live. In the...

Art-viewing is a defining component of society and culture, in part because the experience involves a wide-range and nuanced configuration of emotional and cognitive responses. Precisely because of this complexity, however, questions of the actual nature, scope, and variety of art experience remain largely unanswered: what kinds of patterns do we e...

Paul Locher passed away on 20 August 2024. Paul was an outstanding scientist and a central figure in the field of empirical aesthetics. He made important contributions to numerous areas including the study of symmetry, balance, facial attractiveness, museum behaviour, artwork composition and restoration, and aesthetics of food, but in particular to...

Urban green landscapes, such as street- and ground-level greenery, are essential for urban populations, enabling frequent and spontaneous interactions with nature in cities. While many cities have increased their green infrastructure and landscapes, their impact on well-being and environmental evaluations needs to be studied more. In the present st...

Promoting urban well-being is a significant societal task in the context of rapid urbanization. Past research has highlighted that interaction with urban green spaces, such as parks and forests, is key in promoting urban well-being. However, there is limited knowledge regarding the potential in promoting well-being from non-nature elements. In the...

In museums and art galleries, visitors become less engaged per object over time. This study, comprising a pre-study (N = 31) and a main study (N = 73) in both laboratory and online settings, explores habituation as a potential cause. The primary aim is to reveal the underlying mechanism and propose strategies for its mitigation. Two research questi...

In museums and art galleries, visitors become less engaged per object over time. This study, comprising a pre-study (N = 31) and a main study (N = 73) in both laboratory and online settings, explores habituation as a potential cause. The primary aim is to reveal the underlying mechanism and propose strategies for its mitigation. Two research questi...

In empirical art research, understanding how viewers judge visual artworks as beautiful is often explored through the study of attributes—specific inherent characteristics or artwork features such as color, complexity, and emotional expressiveness. These attributes form the basis for subjective evaluations, including the judgment of beauty. Buildin...

Urban human-made environments present a range of potential benefits for wellbeing through their design. However, there is a lack of comprehensive organization on this topic. To this end, we performed a scoping review to provide an overview of how the urban environment, particularly its designed components, has been previously studied in relation to...

Find the published manuscript here --> https://www.researchgate.net/publication/385852222_What_Can_Happen_When_We_Look_at_Art_An_Exploratory_Network_Model_and_Latent_Profile_Analysis_of_Affective_Cognitive_Aspects_Underlying_Shared_Supraordinate_Responses_to_Museum_Visual_Art

Beauty surrounds us in many ways every day. In three experience sampling (ESM) studies we investigated frequency, category of eliciting stimuli (natural vs human-made) and, the potential moderating role of several individual difference measures on such everyday experiences of beauty in an ecologically valid manner. Further, we explored the impact o...

Introduction Gestalt perception refers to the cognitive ability to perceive various elements as a unified whole. In our study, we delve deeper into the phenomenon of Gestalt recognition in visual cubist art, a transformative process culminating in what is often described as an Aha moment. This Aha moment signifies a sudden understanding of what is...

Digital technologies reshape the way we interact with our environment, including with artworks. Advanced computational imaging solutions allow having extremely high-resolution digital reproductions of artworks outside museums, presumably increasing artwork engagement. We tested whether exploring such reproductions via an interactive interface heigh...

Aesthetic experience has been a highly debated concept in both psychology and philosophy, leading some to argue for abandoning the term. In the current paper we put forth an alternative approach. We propose that aesthetic experience is a continuum rather than discrete: i.e. experiences can be characterized as more or less aesthetic rather than as b...

Predictive processing (PP) offers an intriguing approach to perception, cognition, but also to appreciation of the arts. It does this by positing both a theoretical basis—one might say a ‘metaphor’—for how we engage and respond, placing emphasis on mismatches rather than fluent overlap between schema and environment. Even more, it holds the promise...

In the last few years, a remarkable convergence of interests and results has emerged between scholars interested in the arts and aesthetics from a variety of perspectives and cognitive scientists studying the mind and brain within the predictive processing (PP) framework. This convergence has so far proven fruitful for both sides: while PP is incre...

Predictive processing (PP) offers an intriguing approach to perception, cogni- tion, but also to appreciation of the arts. It does this by positing both a theoretical basis—one might say a ‘metaphor’—for how we engage and respond, placing emphasis on mismatches rather than fluent overlap between schema and environment. Even more, it holds the promi...

It is assumed that multimodal experiences of art (e.g., listening to music while viewing a painting) can improve aesthetic experience as the two modalities can complement each other. In the current museum study, we tested whether the multimodal experience of works of art—where the artwork is inspired by the musical piece—can enhance aesthetic exper...

Beauty surrounds us in many ways every day. In 3 experience sampling (ESM) studies we investigated frequency, category of eliciting stimuli (natural vs man-made) and, the potential moderating role of several individual difference measures of such everyday experiences of beauty in an ecologically valid manner. Further, we explored the impact of such...

This paper challenges the assumption that lines, colors, and shapes have aesthetic effects that are the same for everyone. From an interdisciplinary perspective of art history and empirical aesthetics, we argue that assigning aesthetic effects to specific lines or colors may well be a valid theory for some aesthetic encounters, it falls short of ex...

Social perception relies on different sensory channels, including vision and audition, which are specifically important for judgements of appearance. Therefore, to understand multimodal integration in person perception, it is important to study both face and voice in a synchronized form. We introduce the Vienna Talking Faces (ViTaFa) database, a hi...

In today's age of social media and smartphones, portraits-such as selfies or pictures of friends and family-are very frequently produced, shared and viewed images. Despite their prevalence, the psychological factors that characterize a 'good' photo-one that people will generally like, keep, and think is especially aesthetically pleasing-are not wel...

Reading is often regarded as a mundane aspect of everyday life. However, little is known about the natural reading experiences in daily activities. To fill this gap, this study presents two field studies (N = 39 and 26, respectively), where we describe how people explore visual environments and divide their attention toward text elements in highly...

Understanding an artwork is essential for aesthetic experiences. But how does one form an understanding of art? To investigate this still poorly addressed process, we hypothesized that the easier a stimulus is processed (i.e., higher fluency), the easier it should be understood. We focused on artwork inherent features (i.e., style and content) and...

Reading is often regarded as a mundane aspect of everyday life. However, little is known about the natural reading experiences in daily activities. To fill this gap, this study presents two field studies (N = 39 and 26, respectively), where we describe how people explore visual environments and divide their attention towards text elements in highly...

Creativity is a compelling yet elusive phenomenon, especially when manifested in visual art, where its evaluation is often a subjective and complex process. Understanding how individuals judge creativity in visual art is a particularly intriguing question. Conventional linear approaches often fail to capture the intricate nature of human behavior u...

Symmetry has been recognized as one of the most important visual features to predict aesthetic preferences and was discussed as a potentially universal feature of beauty judgments. Recent studies have challenged such universality claims, by showing that art experts prefer asymmetric stimuli in explicit evaluations, suggesting that artistic training...

The anchoring effect is one of the most robust findings in psychology. In its most general form, the anchoring effect entails that people make relative judgements and decisions compared to some reference point or "anchor". In the current study, we investigate if the anchoring effect could explain why a genuineness effect-a difference in aesthetic e...

Reading in the City: mobile eye-tracking and evaluations of text in everyday street settings.

Art is culturally diverse and so are its viewers. Whereas differences in artworks across cultures have been a major concern of art historians, variances in art perception across culture (e.g., whether and how people who are familiar with different visual cultures look at artworks differently) were little studied so far. Several art-historical theor...

Vocal and facial cues typically co-occur in natural settings, and multisensory processing of voice and face relies on their synchronous presentation. Psychological research has examined various facial and vocal cues to attractiveness as well as to judgements of sexual dimorphism, health, and age. However, few studies have investigated the interacti...

Understanding consciousness is a major frontier in the natural sciences. However, given the nuanced and ambiguous sets of conditions regarding how and when consciousness appears to manifest, it is also one of the most elusive topics for investigation. In this context, we argue that research in empirical aesthetics—specifically on the experience of...

Background Despite severe cognitive dysfunction in Alzheimer's disease (AD), aesthetic preferences in AD patients seem to retain some stability over time, similarly to healthy controls. However, the underlying mechanisms of aesthetic preference stability in AD remain unclear. We therefore aimed to study the role of emotional valence of stimuli for...

For centuries, Western philosophers have argued that aesthetic experiences differ from common, everyday pleasing sensations, and further, that mental states, such as disinterested contemplation and aesthetic distance, underlie these complex experiences. We empirically tested whether basic perceptual processes of information intake reveal evidence f...

Art, as a prestigious cultural commodity, concerns aesthetic and monetary values, personal tastes, and social reputation in various social contexts—all of which are reflected in choices concerning our liking, or in other contexts, our actual willingness-to-pay for artworks. But, how do these different aspects interact in regard to the concept of so...

The pain- and stress-reducing effects of music are well-known, but the effects of visual art, and the combination of these two, are much less investigated. We aim to (1) investigate the pain- and (2) stress-reducing effects of multimodal (music + visual art) aesthetic experience as we expect this to have stronger effects than a single modal aesthet...

We present a unique opportunity to test the ability of artists to systematically evoke emotions in an audience via art and, transversely, for viewers to pick out intentions of the artist. This follows a recent article which had shown this connection using installation artworks by MFA student-artists. However, this earlier article had left open ques...

In empirical aesthetics, choosing stimuli, especially artworks, is a persistent challenge. Artworks differ largely in terms of style, complexity, formal features, and valence, as well as historical context, presentation quality, genre, and content, all of which might influence aesthetic experiences. To advance the comparability of studies and incre...

Digital images taken by mobile phones are the most frequent class of images created today. Due to their omnipresence and the many ways they are encountered, they require a specific focus in research. However, to date, there is no systematic compilation of the various factors that may determine our evaluations of such images, and thus no explanation...

Research has failed to find evidence for a genuineness effect: the idea that aesthetic experiences are better when looking at real artworks versus reproductions of those artworks. One common explanation for this lack of an effect is the facsimile accommodation hypothesis. This hypothesis states that people can “look past” the limitations of a repro...

In this chapter, the authors report on how they joined in the exciting project to lay the theoretical foundations describing aesthetic experiences with artwork. Their 2017 paper was a culmination of meetings, later intense collaboration in Vienna’s empirical aesthetic research group, and the convergence of the models that the authors had independen...

Neuroscience joins the long history of discussions about aesthetics in psychology, philosophy, art history, and the creative arts. In this volume, leading scholars in this nascent field reflect on the promise of neuroaesthetics to enrich our understanding of this universal yet diverse facet of human experience. The volume will inform and stimulate...

Hedonic evaluation of sensory objects varies from person to person. While this variability has been linked to differences in experience, little is known about why stimuli lead to different evaluations in different people. We used linear mixed‐effects models to determine the extent to which the openness, contour, and ceiling height of interior space...

In recent years, understanding psychological constructs as network processes has gained considerable traction in the social sciences. In this paper, we propose the aesthetic effects network (AEN) as a novel way to conceptualize aesthetic experience. The AEN represents an associative process where having one association leads to the next association...

A rather well-accepted finding from museum studies is that repeated art viewing may be tied to reduced attention towards art as individuals see more-and-more stimuli. This attention decrease from repeated art viewing appears to be a basic consequence of interaction with media. Considering lab-based studies in empirical and psychological aesthetics...

In general, people assume that looking at a real artwork—versus a reproduction—provides an experience that is qualitatively heightened, also called the genuineness effect. In this study, we used meta-analysis to assess the current evidence for the genuineness effect. We found a meta-analytic effect of Hedges’s g =.32 (N = 11). However, only three s...

Hedonic evaluation of sensory objects varies from person to person. While this variability has been linked to differences in experience and personality traits, little is known about why stimuli lead to different evaluations in different people. We used linear mixed effect models to determine the extent to which the openness, contour, and ceiling he...

Studies have routinely shown that individuals spend more time spontaneously looking at people or at mimetic scenes that they subsequently judge to be more aesthetically appealing. This “beauty demands longer looks” phenomenon is typically explained by biological relevance, personal utility, or other survival factors, with visual attraction often dr...

The importance of curatorial narrative—the embedding of artworks or an entire exhibition inside a wider context of meaning and significance—is clear in theory but has not been empirically investigated. We do not actually know if curatorial decisions, even something as simple as changing the order or the types of other artworks with which a painting...

When an observer perceives and judges two persons next to each other, different types of social cues simultaneously arise from both perceived faces. Using a controlled stimulus set depicting this scenario (with two persons identified respectively as “target face” and “looking face”), we explored how emotional expressions, gaze, and head direction o...

There is increasing awareness that the perception of art is affected by the way it is presented.In 2018, the Austrian Gallery Belvedere redisplayed its permanent collection. Our multidisciplinary team seized this opportunity to investigate the viewing behavior of specific artworks both before and after the museum’s rearrangement. In contrast to pre...

The idea that simple visual elements such as colors and lines have specific, universal associations—for example red being warm—appears rather intuitive. Such associations have formed a basis for the description of artworks since the 18th century and are still fundamental to discourses on art today. Art historians might describe a painting where red...

This study set out to investigate whether and how aesthetic evaluations of different types of symmetric, as well as abstract vs. representational patterns are modulated by art expertise. To this end, we utilized abstract asymmetric, symmetric, and “broken” patterns slightly deviating from symmetry, as well as more representational patterns resembli...

The article examines an experimental survey that was conducted by Wassily Kandinsky and his students of the wall painting workshop at the Bauhaus Weimar in 1923. In his theoretical writings on art, Kandinsky had assumed there to be direct correspondences between basic colors (yellow, red, blue) and forms (triangle, square, circle), and he operation...

We investigate the potential for modulations in art assessment, involving either "bottom-up" artwork-derived visual features or more overt "top-down" considerations based on personal history or taste. Such changes-whereby individuals might come to relatively increase or decrease their liking of the same works of art-have been suggested in recent ar...

The paper got accepted to Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts in Febuary 2020. Pre-print can be found here; 10.2139/ssrn.3434578 NOTE: that this is therefore also a provisiory file and not the final typeset article.

Sublime encounters provide a compelling example of the peaks of our shared emotional and cognitive experiences. For centuries, these have been a target for philosophy and, more recently, for psychology, with its renewed focus on profound or aesthetic events. The sublime has been theoretically connected to multiple contexts, from interactions with o...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

The visual aesthetics of an object increases visual attention towards the object. It is argued that this relation between liking and attention is an evolutionary adaptation in sexual and natural selection. If this is the case, we would expect this relation to be domain specific, and thus, stronger for biological than for non-biological objects. To...

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a devastating diagnosis with, however, potential for an extremely intriguing aesthetic component. Despite motor and cognitive deficits, an emerging collection of studies report a burst of visual artistic output and alterations in produced art in a subgroup of patients. This provides a unique window into the neurophysiolo...

Neuroaesthetics is a rapidly developing interdisciplinary field of research that aims to understand the neural substrates of aesthetic experience: While understanding aesthetic experience has been an objective of philosophers for centuries, it has only more recently been embraced by neuroscientists. Recent work in neuroaesthetics has revealed that...

Studies found that genuine artworks viewed in a museum receive higher appreciation ratings than reproductions in the laboratory. Due to the mutual variation of context and genuineness, these studies were not able to disentangle these factors. A study designed by Brieber, Leder, and Nadal to systematically differentiate between these two variables d...

Psychological models conceive aesthetic experiences as a sequence of cognitive and emotional processes unfolding over time. Previous studies focused either on effects of presentation time on art experience or on effects of art experience on viewing time. Here, we examined both directions. Three groups of participants (undergrad psychology students)...

Facial attractiveness captures and binds visual attention, thus affecting visual exploration of our environment. It is often argued that this effect on attention has evolutionary functions related to mating. Although plausible, such perspectives have been challenged by recent behavioral and eye-tracking studies, which have shown that the effect on...

Results–larger LMMs. Reasoning for and results of additional LMMs using total fixation duration as dependent variable and including attractiveness as an independent factor. (DOCX)

Being interested in art and having knowledge about art are arguably central dimensions in art experience and two of the most important individual differences when assessing how people process or respond to art. Nonetheless, there is to date no reliable and validated measurement of these dimensions. In this paper, we present the Vienna Art Interest...

Humans appear naturally inclined to both broadcasting and to perceiving each other’s emotional experiences. Especially in the area of empathy or emotion contagion, studies have routinely documented our ability to respond to others’ affective states, often via faces or bodies. This can occur on an intellectual level of perceiving emotion signs or ca...

The present study is a pre-registered replication of a study by Specker et al. (2018) that tests the hypothesis that brightness of colors is associated with positivity. Our results showed an implicit association between brightness and positivity in both Study 1 and Study 2, however, an explicit association between brightness and positivity was only...

The sublime is an enduring concept in Western aesthetic discourse and is often portrayed such as in Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful of 1759 as a delightful horror, a kind of enjoyment based on negative emotions. In the current article, the relationship between sublimity and fear was e...

First impressions from faces emerge quickly and shape subsequent behaviour. Given that different pictures of the same face evoke different impressions, we asked whether presentation order affects the overall impression of the person. In three experiments, we presented naturally varying photos of a person’s face in ascending (low-to-high) or descend...

Abstract for poster at VSS2108. See forthcoming article in Neuroimage.

Installation art is one of the most important and provocative developments in the visual arts during the last half century and has become a key focus of artists and of contemporary museums. It is also seen as particularly challenging or even disliked by many viewers, and—due to its unique in situ, immersive setting—is equally regarded as difficult...

Pervasive mobile eye tracking provides a rich data source to investigate human natural behavior, providing a high degree of ecological validity in natural environments. However, challenges and limitations intrinsic to unconstrained mobile eye tracking makes its development and usage to some extent an art. Nonetheless, researchers are pushing the bo...

To date the complexity of an image is most often equated with its visual complexity. However, recent studies have shown that when it comes to artworks, complexity ratings are also influenced by semantic processes. The present study investigates the relationship between perceived image complexity and content-related processes in paintings by compari...

Scientific disciplines as diverse as biology, physics, and psychological aesthetics regard symmetry as one of the most important principles in nature and one of the most powerful determinants of beauty. However, symmetry has a low standing in the arts and humanities. This difference in the valuation of symmetry is a remarkable illustration of the g...

Drawing or otherwise making visual art is one of our most unique distinctions from other animals and acts as an empirical window into human perception, creativity, and thought. Despite its importance, art production has rarely been investigated in empirical studies, which have instead focused on realistic copying or comparison of those with differi...

Free Link for 50 days: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001691817302299 The present study investigates the hypothesis that brightness of colors is associated with positivity, postulating that this is an automatic and universal effect. The Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998) was used in all studie...

A controversial hypothesis, named the Sexualized Body Inversion Hypothesis (SBIH), claims similar visual processing of sexually objectified women (i.e., with a focus on the sexual body parts) and inanimate objects as indicated by an absence of the inversion effect for both type of stimuli. The current study aims at shedding light into the mechanism...