Reading and writing direction effects on the aesthetic appreciation of photographs

ABSTRACT

Does reading and writing direction (RWD) influence the aesthetic appreciation of photography? Pérez González showed that nineteenth-century Iranian and Spanish professional photographers manifest lateral biases linked to RWD in their compositions. The present study aimed to test whether a population sample showed similar biases. Photographs with left-to-right (L–R) and right-to-left (R–L) directionality were selected from Pérez González’s collections and presented in both original and mirror-reversed forms to Spanish (L–R readers) and Moroccan (R–L readers) participants. In Experiment 1, participants rated each picture for its aesthetic pleasingness. The results showed neither effects of lateral organization nor interactions with RWD. In Experiment 2, each picture and its mirror version were presented together and participants chose the one they liked better. Spaniards preferred rightward versions and Moroccans preferred leftward versions. RWD therefore affects aesthetic impressions of photography in our participants when people pay attention to the lateral spatial dimension of pictures. The observed directional aesthetic preferences were not sensitive to the sex of the model in the photographs, failing to support expectations from the hypotheses of emotionality and agency. Preferences were attributable to the interaction between general scanning strategies and scanning habits linked to RWD.

KEYWORDS:

• Aesthetics
• reading and writing direction
• spatial biases
• photography
• fluency

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the members of the Grounded Cognition Lab (www.groundedcognitionlab.com) at University of Granada as well as to our participants. We are also grateful to PhD. Alexander Gamst Page (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) for text proofing. Portions of this paper were presented at the 37th Annual Cognitive Science Society Meeting, Pasadena, 2015, and the Annual Conference of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology, Cyprus, 2015.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

I. Chris McManus http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3510-4814

Julio Santiago http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0346-2740

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by grants P09-SEJ-4772 from Junta de Andalucía and European Regional Development Fund, and PSI2012–32464 from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity to Julio Santiago.