Aesthetic experience enhances first-person spatial representation

Abstract

Episodic autobiographical memories are characterized by a spatial context and an affective component. But how do affective and spatial aspects interact? Does affect modulate the way we encode the spatial context of events? We investigated how one element of affect, namely aesthetic liking, modulates memory for location, in three online experiments (n = 124, 79, and 80). Participants visited a professionally curated virtual art exhibition. They then relocated previously viewed artworks on the museum map and reported how much they liked them. Across all experiments, liking an artwork was associated with increased ability to recall the wall on which it was hung. The effect was not explained by viewing time and appeared to modulate recognition speed. The liking-wall memory effect remained when participants attended to abstractness, rather than liking, and when testing occurred 24 h after the museum visit. Liking also modulated memory for the room where a work of art was hung, but this effect primarily involved reduced room memory for disliked artworks. Further, the liking-wall memory effect remained after controlling for effects of room memory. Recalling the wall requires recalling one's facing direction, so our findings suggest that positive aesthetic experiences enhance first-person spatial representations. More generally, a first-person component of positive affect transfers to wider spatial representation and facilitates the encoding of locations in a subject-centered reference frame. Affect and spatial representations are therefore important, and linked, elements of sentience and subjectivity. Memories of aesthetic experiences are also spatial memories of how we encountered a work of art. This linkage may have implications for museum design.

Keywords: aesthetics; affect; first person; memory; spatial representation.

Fig. 1.

Museum setting, paradigm, and general performance. (A) Example of a museum map and view of the environment. The virtual environment was composed of eight successive exhibition rooms with three artworks, one on the left, one on the front, and one on the right wall relative to the entrance door. See also SI Appendix, Fig. S1, showing the four maps used in this experiment. The three works of art shown in this view are: left, “#FOREST,” by Mathieu Merlet-Briand (2019); front, “Digital Aquarelle 10,” by Aaron Scheer (2019); and right, “Clouds,” by Arnaud Laffond (2016). See all artworks at www.mocda.org/abstract-art-new-media. (B) Schematic representation of the position of the artwork on the left, front, and right walls. (C) Tasks after the museum visit. Recognition task: The 24 artworks of the museum and 24 new artworks were successively and randomly presented. Participants reported for each whether they had seen the artwork in the museum or not, and their confidence level (six-level scale). Spatial memory task: Participants were shown all the artworks they reported seeing and dragged and dropped each to its location in the museum map. They also reported their confidence (six-level scale) and were given feedback on their response. Liking task: Participants rated their liking of all 48 artworks. The artwork shown here is “Explicitly Activist,” by Darcy Gerbarg (2017). (D) General performance. Left: number of hits and false alarms for each participant (black dots; average: green dot). Middle: Percentage of correct wall responses for each participant (black dots; average: green dot; chance level: red dotted line). Right: Percentage responses in each bin of the liking scale, averaged across participants. Only artworks presented in the museum were considered.

Fig. 2.

Liking increases the ability to recollect the wall where artworks were hung. (A–C) Percentage of correct wall responses, for all responses collapsed across participants, in three quantiles along the liking scale (z scored for each participant). The x coordinate of each tertile corresponds to the average liking rating. Chance level: 33%. Error bars represent SEM. Experiment 1: main experiment; experiment 2: focus on abstractness; experiment 3: 24-h delay testing. (D) Liking effect for each of the three experiments. Each bar represents the parameter estimate of the liking effect, from the models predicting wall memory (predictor: liking; predictors of noninterest: wall and room number; random effects: participant and artwork number). There was no significant difference between the parameter estimates from the three experiments. ***P < 0.001, **P < 0.01, *P < 0.05.