“Aha”ptics: Enjoying an Aesthetic Aha During Haptic Exploration

Abstract

Perceptual insight, like recognizing hidden figures, increases the appreciation of visually perceived objects. We examined this Aesthetic Aha paradigm in the haptic domain. Participants were thinking aloud during haptic exploration of 11 visually nonaccessible panels. They explored them again evaluating them on liking, pleasingness, complexity, and interestingness. Afterwards they rated photographs of the panels on the same variables. Haptic pleasingness was predictable by the strength of insight (Aha!) during free exploration and the material feel. Liking was increased when complexity was high in addition. Pleasingness and interest were negatively related to each other but predicted liking in a combined model. Personality and explorative strategies were considered, for example, strength of insight was increased for ambiguity-tolerant people, and people with high need for closure explored more globally. Evaluations of haptic and visual explorations correlated significantly, and in both modalities, complexity correlated more strongly with interest than with liking. Our study transfers the Aesthetic Aha effect to the haptic domain and reveals slight differences in its hedonic quality with a potentially higher relevance of pleasingness. We suggest that revealing a (meaningful) structure during exploration—visually or haptically—can enhance positive affect and interest hereby benefits from an increased level of complexity.

How Does Knowledge About an Artist’s Disability Change the Aesthetic Experience?

“…Our results do not allow us to claim that the information about the artist’s disability caused the aesthetic Aha experience ( Muth & Carbon, 2013 ; Muth et al, 2013 ; Muth et al, 2015 , 2016 ; Muth et al, 2019 ) towards sculptures and drawings made by blind artists–as this information did not cause the aesthetic emotions to become more positive (cf. Shen et al, 2016 ).…”

“…Making sense of artworks might even cause the aesthetic Aha, an increase in aesthetic pleasure and higher appreciation of artworks (cf. Muth & Carbon, 2013 ; Muth et al, 2013 ; Muth et al, 2015 , 2016 ; Muth et al, 2019 ). The experience of Aha in the aesthetic episode should cause an increase in positive emotions (cf.…”

Individual Differences in Aesthetic Preferences for Multi-Sensorial Stimulation

“…Just as Carbon and Janesch [4] pointed out, whilst vision is the sense that has been widely studied in aesthetics, in many circumstances haptic and tactile features may overpower visual features in terms of pleasure. They have, therefore, argued that any model which describes aesthetic responses must consider more than one sense at a time (see also Muth et al [5]). To explore how different senses contribute to the overall aesthetic experience, Soranzo et al [6] studied the aesthetic preference for Interactive Objects (IOs).…”

Psychology of Design

“…Gestalt psychology was an eminent stream of research (Koffka 1935) that also influenced the domain of design, mainly through Rudolf Arnheim's linkage of Gestalt perception and art (Arnheim 1954). A Gestalt has a strong impact on human perceivers, actually we cannot escape a Gestalt: A Gestalt inherently signals unity and consistency, it automatically directs attention (Kimchi et al 2016) and creates aesthetic appeal in several modal domains (Muth & Carbon 2013;Muth et al 2019). Nevertheless, the full power of Gestalt in design still has not been lifted yet, although perceived quality, an important asset of design, is mainly associated with coherence and thus Gestalt.…”