Perceptual fluency effects in judgments of creativity and beauty: creative objects are perceived fluently yet they are visually complex

ABSTRACT

Perceptual fluency typically has a positive influence on aesthetic evaluations of beauty, but few studies have examined its influence on creativity evaluations. Creativity has two facets, originality and quality. If creativity judgments involve estimating product originality, such judgments may be associated with perceptual disfluency, while product quality may be associated with perceptual fluency. We examined the relationship between perceptual fluency and judgments of creativity and beauty across seven experiments. Creativity judgments were affected by most perceptual fluencysources. We observed a highly-fluent-is-beautiful-and-creative relation when testing repeated exposure and figure-ground contrast. Prototypicality displayed a high-fluency–is-beautiful relation, with creativity judgments unaffected. Visual complexity displayed a consistent disfluent-is-creative effect, with mixed results for beauty. For creativity (but not beauty) evaluations, increased saliency of visual complexity led to discounting fluent-is-creative effects, supporting the hypothesis that there are at least two fluency pathways to creativity judgments that take both originality and quality into account.

KEYWORDS:

• Perceptual fluency
• evaluation
• judgment
• creativity
• beauty

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Bo T. Christensen http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6005-9408

Linden J. Ball http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5099-0124

Notes

1 We did not predict quadratic effects for how visual complexity would affect creativity judgments, but we do, for the sake of complete reporting, include a footnote in the few instances where significant quadratic effects were found in this respect. For all other fluency manipulations besides visual complexity we did not expect (and we also did not find) significant quadratic effects on either judgments of creativity or judgments of beauty.

2 Two participants were dropped from the analysis due to missing data as repeated-measures ANOVA is ill equipped to handle such missing data. For the same reason a few participants were also omitted from the analyses for other experiments: Experiment 2 (1 participant), Experiment 3 (2 participants) and Experiment 5 (2 participants). No participants were removed from the analyses for the remaining experiments.

3 We did, in addition, find a non-planned quadratic effect (U-shaped) for creativity judgments, F(1, 62) = 13.56, p < .001, ${\eta }_p^2$ = 0.18, albeit with a substantially reduced effect size compared to the linear effect.

4 We did, in addition, find a non-planned quadratic trend (inverse U-shape) for the effect of number of elements on creativity judgments, F(1, 69) = 4.19, p < .05, ${\eta }_p^2$ = .06, albeit with a much reduced effect size compared to the linear effect.

5 As evident from the visual inspection of Figure 5, we found non-planned cubic effects for both creativity judgments, F(1, 44) = 16.50, p < .001, ${\eta }_p^2$ = 0.27, and beauty judgments F(1, 44) = 34.69, p < .001, ${\eta }_p^2$ = 0.44.

6 We did, in addition, find a non-planned quadratic effect (inverse U-shaped) for figural variety on creativity judgments, F(1, 33) = 4.60, p < .05, ${\eta }_p^2$ = 0.12, albeit with a reduced effect size compared to the liner trend.