Although fluency theory predominates psychological research on human aesthetics, its most severe limitation may be to explain why art that challenges or even violates easy processing can nevertheless be aesthetically rewarding. We discuss long-standing notions on art’s potential to offer mental growth opportunities and to tap into a basic epistemic predisposition that hint at a fluency counteracting aesthetic pleasure mechanism. Based on divergent strands of literature on empirical, evolutionary, and philosophical aesthetics, as well as research on disfluency, we presumed that challenging art requires deliberate reflexive processing at the level of “aboutness” in order to be experientially pleasing. Here, we probed such a cognitive mastering mechanism, achieved by iterative cycles of elaboration, as predicted by our model of aesthetic experiences. For the study, two kinds of portraits were applied, one associable to a high fluency and one to a high stimulation potential (according to results of an extensive rating study). In Experiment 1, we provided a repeated evaluation task, which revealed a distinctive preference effect for challenging portraits that was absent in the visual exposition conditions of a familiarity and a mere exposure task (Experiment 2). In a follow-up task (Experiment 3) this preference effect was observed with a novel and more encompassing pool of portraits, which corroborated its stability and robustness. In an explorative stimulus-transfer task (Experiment 4), we investigated the presumed underlying mechanism by testing whether the observed effect would generalize onto novel portraits of the same artist-specific styles. Results discounted an alternative interpretation of a perceptual adaptation effect and hinted at meaning-driven mental activity. Conjointly, findings for inexperienced viewers were indicative of an elaboration based mastering mechanism that selectively operated for mentally challenging portraits. Moreover, findings were in line with a dual-process view of human preference formation with art. Theoretical implications and boundary conditions are discussed.

<b>Introduction</b>: Previous studies have found that music paired with lyrics at encoding may improve the memory performance of patients with mild Alzheimer's disease (AD). To further explore memory for different types of musical stimuli, the current study examined both implicit and explicit memory for music with and without lyrics compared to spoken lyrics. <b>Method</b>: In this mixed design, patients with probable mild AD (<i>n</i> = 15) and healthy older adults (<i>n</i> = 13) listened to auditory clips (song, instrumental, or spoken lyrics varied across three sessions) and then had their memory tested. Implicit memory was measured by the mere exposure effect. Explicit recognition memory was measured using a confidence-judgment receiver operating characteristic (ROC) paradigm, which allowed examination of the separate contributions made by familiarity and recollection. <b>Results</b>: A significant implicit memory mere exposure effect was found for both groups in the instrumental and song but not the spoken condition. Both groups had the best explicit memory performance in the spoken condition, followed by song, and then instrumental conditions. Healthy older adults demonstrated more recollection than patients with AD in the song and spoken conditions, but both groups performed similarly in the instrumental condition. Patients with AD demonstrated more familiarity in the instrumental and song conditions than in the spoken condition. <b>Conclusions</b>: The results have implications for memory interventions for patients with mild AD. The implicit memory findings suggest that patients with AD may still show a preference for information familiar to them. The explicit memory results support prior findings that patients with AD rely heavily on familiarity, but also suggest that there may be limitations on the benefits that music can provide to recognition memory performance.

There is an interactive relationship between humans and landscapes. Humans inherently assess landscapes by creating spontaneous preferences based on surrounding stimuli. Vision plays a key role in these preferences. Visual preferences are relevant for understanding visual aesthetic liking (VAL), which needs to be evaluated objectively. This study was carried out in Herakleia ad Latmos, comprising Lake Bafa Natural Park and the Latmos-Beşparmak Mountains. The aim of this paper is to predict people’s VAL of historical sites (HS) by applying processing fluency theory to social media data. Among fluency theory metrics, four metrics – visual simplicity, visual symmetry, visual contrast, and visual self-similarity, were used to develop an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model. Two primary questions are explored in this study: (1) How to quantify spontaneous visits of people near historical sites, and (2) how to estimate preferences of people based on distances to HS regardless of landscape types (either cultural or natural). Results show that people mostly visited three HS out of thirteen historical sites between 2004 and 2020: Kapıkırı Island (HS 1), and the ancient cities of Herakleia (HS 2) and Latmos (HS 3). According to the findings of the OLS regression model, year (t = 8.99, p &amp;lt;.0001), visual simplicity (t = -4.64, p ≤ 0.0001), and visual contrast (t = -2.01, p = 0.04) of the geotagged photos were all statistically significant predictors of VAL. HS 2 had the highest VAL value, followed by HS 1, and HS 3.

Processing fluency has been shown to affect how people aesthetically evaluate stimuli. While this effect is well documented for visual stimuli, the evidence accumulated for auditory stimuli has not yet been integrated. Our aim was to examine the relevant research on how processing fluency affects the aesthetic appreciation of auditory stimuli and to identify the extant knowledge gaps in this body of evidence. This scoping review of 19 studies reported across 13 articles found that, similarly to visual stimuli, fluency has a positive effect on liking of auditory stimuli. Additionally, we identified certain elements that impede the generalizability of the current research on the relationship between fluency and aesthetic reactions to auditory stimuli, such as a lack of consistency in the number of repeated exposures, the tendency to omit the affective component and the failure to account for personal variables such as musical abilities developed through musical training or the participants' personality or preferences. These results offer a starting point in developing novel and proper processing fluency manipulations of auditory stimuli and suggest several avenues for future research aiming to clarify the impact and importance of processing fluency and disfluency in this domain.

Nostalgia is a mixed emotion that is often evoked by music. Nostalgic music may induce temporary improvements in autobiographical memory in individuals with cognitive decline. However, the neural mechanism underlying music-evoked nostalgia and its associated memory improvements is unclear. With the ultimate goal of understanding how nostalgia-evoking music may help retrieve autobiographical memories in individuals with cognitive impairment, we first sought to understand the neural underpinnings of these processes in healthy younger and older adults. Methodological constraints, including the lack of personally tailored and experimentally controlled stimuli, have impeded our understanding of this mechanism. Here, we utilized an innovative machine-learning-based method to construct three categories of songs, all matched for musical features: (1) personalized nostalgic, (2) familiar non-nostalgic, and (3) unfamiliar non-nostalgic. In 57 participants (29 aged 18-35; 28 aged 60 and older), we investigated the functional neural correlates of music-evoked nostalgia using fMRI. Four main findings emerged: (1) Listening to nostalgic music, more than familiar non-nostalgic or unfamiliar music, was associated with bilateral activity in the default mode network, salience network, reward network, medial temporal lobe, and supplementary motor regions, (2) Psychophysiological interaction (PPI) models indicated that listening to nostalgic music involved increased functional connectivity of self-referential (posteromedial cortex) and affect-related regions (insula), (3) Older adults had stronger BOLD signals than younger adults in nostalgia-related regions during nostalgic listening, (4) While the BOLD response to nostalgic music in younger adults was associated with trait-level factors of nostalgia proneness and cognitive ability, the response in older adults was related to affective responses to the music. Overall, our findings serve as a foundation for understanding the neural basis of music-evoked nostalgia and its potential use in future clinical interventions.

Background: Hedonic (or aesthetic) preferences to repeated sensory stimulation can remain stable over time (Island of Stability Effect, ISE) or vary with prior exposures (Mere Exposure Effect, MEE). Objective: Here we compared the liking ratings of seniors with cognitive impairments (mostly mild-to-moderate dementia, DPs) and neurotypical senior controls (CNs) to audio and visual stimuli and examined whether those ratings conformed to the ISE or the MEE predictions. Method: Participants (n = 212) rated sets of stimuli repeated three times at weekly intervals: images of Picasso’s paintings, PANTONE color cards, and avant-garde music clips. Results: The aggregated liking ratings of DPs and CNs were stable over time, in line with the ISE model. However, latent growth modeling indicated that those stable responses might have masked differences at the individual level, since seniors in both cohorts exhibited clusters of different responses over the time evaluated, supporting the predictions of the MEE. Notably, there was a dampening of hedonic experiences in DPs comparatively to CNs. Conclusion: The presence of hedonic responses (and individual variations) in DPs is relevant not only to their wellbeing and therapy interventions involving audio and visual stimulation, but also to the design of spaces that offset the downturn in hedonic experiences affecting seniors with cognitive impairments. The most common explanations for MEE responses are the (i) perceptual (or processing) fluency hypothesis, the (ii) Zajonc’s affective model, and the (iii) Berlyne’s two-factor model. The perceptual fluency model posits that the pre-exposure to a (conscious or subliminal) stimulus could increase the ease with which it is processed, which in turn would increase the positive affect directed to the stimuli [ 15 ], possibly by reducing stimulus uncertainty [ 16 ]. In line with those findings, Reber and colleagues examined the effect of perceptual fluency on different affective judgements and showed that the exposure to visual stimuli after priming resulted in an increase in positive affect, without engaging attention or deliberate cognitive processing [ 17, 18 ]. Zajonc’s affective model of MEE postulates an evolutionary basis for the caution experienced when exposed to novel stimuli in the absence of reinforcement. The uncertainty and suspicion lessen if the repeated exposures have no negative consequences, which can lead to positive changes in affective judgements [ 14–16, 19, 20 ]. Atonal music, on the other hand, tends to evoke lower emotional responses than tonal music (Ben-Tal, personal communication). Since the effect of repeated exposures to atonal music in elderly with or without cognitive impairments is unknown, this study compared DPs and CNs hedonic responses to atonal music. The appreciation of paintings and color in dementia Some painters diagnosed with cognitive impairments (e.g., Willem de Kooning, William Utermohlen) continued painting until advanced stages of their condition [ 37 ]. As far as it could be accessed, none of the participants were artists (professional or amateur) or were color blind, and all participants had normal or corrected-to-normal vision. Stimuli It is relevant to note that relatively novel and simple stimuli can be generated for studies conducted in the laboratory, but the same is not always true in naturalistic scenarios with complex stimuli (e.g., paintings), where ‘zero’ stimulus pre-exposure is often unattainable due to the difficulty in controlling for a variety of familiar elements inherent to such stimuli. DISCUSSION Hedonic (or aesthetic) experiences can emerge from the interaction between the perceptual features of artworks and other objects and the perceptual dynamics of the observer’s sensory processes. This study examined the effect of repeated exposures to audio and visual stimulation in mixed dementia patients (mild-to-moderate symptoms; DPs) and in neurotypical seniors (CNs) when tested in everyday settings. More specifically, it investigated if the liking ratings to images of Picasso paintings, PANTONE color cards, and atonal music in DPs and CNs were stable across repeated exposures (as predicted by the ISE model), or if they increased/decrease with exposure (as predicted by the MEE models). Two sets of stimuli were relatively complex (avant-garde music clips and Picasso paintings) and one set was relatively ubiquitous and simple (color cards). The avant-garde music clips were novel stimuli, but the novelty of the Picasso paintings was not clear. This is congruent with the findings of Boutoleau-Bretonnière and colleagues (2016), who examined the hedonic evaluations of 15 patients with frontotemporal dementia The decrease in ratings could be linked to an affective “wear out” caused by previous exposures to similar or related stimulation, which would raise the internal noise in a hedonic processing system and “down-play” the responses to tested stimuli, as suggested in predictive models [ 53, 54 ]. Alternatively, repeated stimulation could have triggered a preference transfer through fluency [ 18 ] or implicit learning [ 55 ] and further exposures would lead to a decline in liking due to satiation or boredom [ 56 ]. The increase in liking ratings could indicate that the stimuli were novel and satiation had not been reached, or that changes in internal states lead to positive evaluations. For example, the increase in affect for paintings and atonal music after repeated exposures observed at the individual level is in line with previous studies [ 25, 57–60 ]. Despite of the large number of DPs in this study in comparison to previous empirical studies, there were several limitations. As mentioned previously, the neurological heterogeneity of DPs might have masked yet unknown dementia-specific cognitive and affective impairments modulating hedonic preferences. A more homogeneous DP cohort is needed to confirm and expand the findings reported here.

The purpose of this research was to examine the effects of musical pantophagy, classical music consumption, and initial receptivity to select musical examples on changes in preference rating resulting from a program of repeated exposure. Participants included undergraduate students enrolled in a section of music appreciation at a large Southeastern university ( n = 67). Data were collected using a research designed preference rating measure (PRM) administered during a 5-week period within which there were eight test measures. Participants were divided into quartiles. Pre- to post-test measures resulted in a general positive trend for all participants. Comparisons of Q1 (lowest pantophagy) and Q3 (highest pantophagy) on PRMs 1–8 yielded no differences between groups, and PRM 8 was significantly different from PRM 1 for both groups. The same comparisons for Q1 (non-Classical music consumption) indicated significant difference with large effect size and for Q1 (lowest initial receptivity) indicated significant difference. Results suggest that regardless of musical pantophagy, repetition is an effective means by which to increase affective response to music, and that students who do not currently consume formal art music and who have low initial receptivity may report greater increases in affective response to music over time.

Background: Music evoked autobiographical memories (MEAMs) have been documented in people with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), but it is unclear whether music is more effective than other familiar stimuli at evoking memories. Objective: To explore the frequency and specificity of memories in response to famous songs compared with photographs of famous events (photograph evoked autobiographical memories, PEAMs), and whether stimuli from the period of the reminiscence bump (10–30 years of age) were more likely to elicit memories. Methods: 10 participants with AD and 10 aged-matched healthy elderly people reported memories following exposure to 2 songs (longest time at number one in Australian music charts) and 2 photographs (of prominent famous events) from each decade from 1930 to 2010. Results: PEAMs were more frequent than MEAMs in healthy elderly (p < 0.05), but no such differences were observed among people with AD. There was no difference in the frequency of MEAMs between groups, but people with AD showed a significant decline in the frequency of PEAMs. In both groups, MEAMs were typically less specific than PEAMs and comprised semantic knowledge or repeated/extended events. Stimuli from when participants were aged 10–30 years triggered more frequent memories compared with stimuli from later decades, but this was only statistically significant for MEAMs. Conclusion: Our findings indicate a preserved mnemonic effect of music relative to pictures in this patient population, corro