Cognitive Psychology of Memory, Attention and Perception

This paper presents some results of a research on aesthetic perception conducted in innovative way through the use of one of the most popular social network (Facebook), in order to explore a new investigation field based on the intersection among Psychology of Perception, Neuroesthetics and Information Technology. Exploiting the well-known system of 'like' and 'share', on which that platform is based, thousands of images of artworks have been submitted to a sample of over 10,000 users worldwide. Through the metrics analysis of users' choices, we observed that some specific compositional elements inside the artworks are able to activate the aesthetic preferences by the viewers towards specific artworks rather than others. The steady repetition of the preferences related to the same compositional elements has made possible to predict the subsequent aesthetic choices by the viewers towards not yet posted artworks. According to results of our investigation it was possible to identify some 'responsive' compositional elements inside the artworks, that would be able to activate the Beauty Perception and the Aesthetic Pleasure in all perceivers. The precognition of these specific elements would allow to influence and drive the aesthetic preferences of the public towards an artwork rather than another: the inclusion of those 'responsive' elements within an artwork would allow to activate the Aesthetic Pleasure of the viewers, in order to predetermine and influence their aesthetic preferences. In this way it would be possible to develop a specific 'Aesthetic Algorithm' able to predict an artwork's Beauty, according to which we could know beforehand if a given artwork is capable of activating the Aesthetic Pleasure in the perceivers: the foreknowledge of the compositional elements able to activate the Aesthetic Pleasure would allow to foresee, predetermine and influence the aesthetic preferences of the viewers towards an artworks, with many implications for the Art Market. We have defined this predictive analysis of the artworks' Beauty, and the foreknowledge of aesthetic preferences of the public, as 'Precognitive Aesthetics'.

Dispositional anxiety is a well-established risk factor for the development of psychiatric disorders along the internalizing spectrum, including anxiety and depression. Importantly, many of the maladaptive behaviors characteristic of anxiety, such as anticipatory apprehension, occur when threat is absent. This raises the possibility that anxious individuals are less efficient at gating threat’s access to working memory, a limited capacity workspace where information is actively retained, manipulated, and used to flexibly guide goal-directed behavior when it is no longer present in the external environment. Using a well-validated neurophysiological index of working memory storage, we demonstrate that threat-related distracters were difficult to filter on average and that this difficulty was exaggerated among anxious individuals. These results indicate that dispositionally anxious individuals allocate excessive working memory storage to threat, even when it is irrelevant to the task at hand. More broadly, these results provide a novel framework for understanding the maladaptive thoughts and actions characteristic of internalizing disorders.