Art preferences are affected by a number of subjective factors. This paper reports two studies which investigated whether need for closure shapes implicit art preferences. It was predicted that higher need for closure would negatively affect implicit preferences for abstract art. In study one, 60 participants were tested for dispositional need for closure and then completed an Implicit Association Test (IAT) task to measure their implicit preference for abstract (vs. figurative) paintings. In study two, 54 participants completed the same IAT task. In this experiment need for closure was both manipulated by cognitive load and tapped as a dispositional trait. Results of the studies converged in showing that after controlling for other important individual factors such as participants'expertise and cognitive ability, need for closure, both as a dispositional trait and as a situationally induced motivational state, was negatively associated with implicit preference for abstract art. We firstly review the literature on individual differences and art preferences, then we address the concept of epistemic motivation and need for closure and its relationship with art preferences. Individual Differences in Art Preferences To some extent aesthetic judgments and art preferences depend on personality characteristics. Eysenck investigated in various studies [11] , [12] people's aesthetic preferences by asking participants to rank groups of different images (e.g. Urgency and permanency were shown to affect a wide range of individual, interpersonal and group phenomena mediated by information processing [24] , [27] , [22] , [28] . NFC and Art Preference Epistemic motivation may also influence preference for specific kind of art. One would expect higher levels of NFC to be associated with a dislike of more abstract, metaphorical and ambiguous visual stimuli and hence a preference for more representational, concrete artworks. In general, the processing fluency of a stimulus affects its aesthetic appreciation. The ease with which viewers extract meaning from an artwork (i.e. In fact, processing ambiguous and poorly defined pieces of art appears to conflict with a desire to attain a quick closure of the epistemic process. Appreciation of abstract art requires more effort in information processing that would misfit to the tendency to urgency induced by NFC and the intolerance of ambiguity displayed by high NFC individuals, providing a possible explanation for a negative affective response to abstract artworks. Chirumbolo and Mannetti [35] conducted a series of studies to test these hypotheses, investigating the impact of NFC on art preferences. Since this study was published, several scholars have used the IAT procedure to explore implicit processes in the context of aesthetics and preferences. Pavlović and Marković [43] wanted to explore the implicit aesthetic evaluation using more specific categories of artistic stimuli (rather than simply categorizing them as ‘figurative’ or ‘abstract’) so they considered a semantically homogenous category - artistic portraits - and a category that lacks semantic information - abstract art. They are also the first investigation of the hypothesis that implicit art evaluations can be explained by a psychological variable such as dispositional and situational NFC. Study One In the first study, the relationship between dispositional NFC and implicit art preference was investigated. It was assumed that a higher NFC would be negatively associated with implicit preference for abstract rather than figurative paintings. We also aimed to show that this effect was due to NFC and not to other confounding factors such as art expertise and cognitive ability. Dispositional and situational NFC exerted independent effects on implicit art preferences and situational NFC had a greater impact than dispositional NFC. General Discussion These studies were designed to demonstrate that implicit relative evaluations of abstract and figurative paintings depend on epistemic motivation. In two experiments we investigated how a specific type of epistemic motivation, NFC, influenced implicit art preferences. It was hypothesized that higher NFC would negatively affect implicit preference for abstract over figurative art. Abstract art is commonly judged to be more complex, more difficult, less typical and less familiar than figurative art [42] . Mastandrea and colleagues [42] showed that aesthetic evaluations could be implicit, occurring in the absence of awareness of their content, which opened up a new and promising line of research, use of implicit measures to study aesthetic and art preferences. In line with findings obtained using explicit measures, results revealed that individuals tend to have implicit preferences for figurative rather than abstract art [42] . This preference is often explained in terms of processing fluency. Finally, familiarity refers to how familiar or novel a given object is. Familiar items are processed faster and therefore tend to be preferred to more novel ones. Usually individuals without art expertise (the large majority of participants in psychological studies) are more familiar with classical and figurative art and therefore tend to appreciate them more than other types of art. The preference, explicit and implicit, for figurative rather than abstract art is consistent and robust, but can only partially be explained by reference to intrinsic characteristics. Dispositional and situationally induced NFC had an additive effect on implicit art preferences, as they both contributed independently. However situationally induced NFC was a stronger predictor of preference than dispositional NFC. Whether an individual likes or dislikes an abstract painting appears to depend strongly on temporary epistemic motivational state, which is influenced by conditions which affect NFC, such as cognitive load, time pressure, low accountability, noise, dullness of the task etc.