Emotion and novelty processing in an implicit aesthetic experience of architectures

The present study explored the implicit aesthetic processing of different architectures using an event-related potential method. Event-related potential data were acquired in a categorization task in which participants were asked to distinguish between two different categories of pictures of everyday life objects and the architectures as soon as possible. The architectural pictures included two categories: noted-architect-designed and ordinary architectures. A smaller P2 amplitude and a larger N2 amplitude were elicited by the master architects' works than those of ordinary architectures, which indicated that perceived positive emotion and novelty perception occurred in the aesthetic processing of architectures. Our results present two sensitive neural indicators, P2 and N2, to judge the delight and novelty qualities shown by the architecture, respectively.