The processing fluency theory of aesthetic pleasure is a theory in psychological aesthetics on how people experience beauty

Beauty

Beauty is a characteristic of a person, animal, place, object, or idea that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure, meaning, or satisfaction. Beauty is studied as part of aesthetics, sociology, social psychology, and culture...

. Processing fluency

Processing fluency

Processing fluency is the ease with which information is processed in the mind. The ease with which perceptual stimuli are processed is perceptual fluency; the ease with which information can be retrieved from memory is retrieval fluency....

 is the ease with which information is processed in the human mind. The theory

Theory

The English word theory was derived from a technical term in Ancient Greek philosophy. The word theoria, , meant "a looking at, viewing, beholding", and referring to contemplation or speculation, as opposed to action...

 is based on four basic assumptions:

1. Objects differ in the fluency with which they can be processed. Variables that facilitate fluent processing include objective features of stimuli, like goodness of form, symmetry, figure-ground contrast, as well as experience with a stimulus, for example repeated exposure or prototypicality.
2. Processing fluency is itself hedonically marked (that is, it possesses an inherent affective quality) and high fluency is subjectively experienced as positive.
3. In line with the "feelings-as-information" account, processing fluency feeds into judgments of aesthetic appreciation because people draw on their subjective experience in making evaluative judgments, unless the informational value of the experience is called into question.
4. The impact of fluency is moderated by expectations and attribution. On one hand, fluency has a particularly strong impact on affective experience if its source is unknown and fluent processing comes as a surprise. On the other hand, the fluency-based affective experience is discounted as a source of relevant information when the perceiver attributes the experience to an irrelevant source. This helps explain the inverted U-shaped function often found in research on the effect of complexity on preferences: very complex patterns are not judged as beautiful because they are disfluent, and patterns are judged as more beautiful when they become less complex. When viewers perceive a simple pattern, they are often able to detect the source of fluency—the pattern's simplicity—and do not use this experience of ease for judging the beauty of the pattern.

The processing fluency theory of aesthetic pleasure emphasizes the interaction between the viewer and an object in that it integrates theories and a wide range of empirical evidence that focus on effects of objective stimulus attributes on perceived beauty with those that emphasize the role of experience, for example by invoking prototypicality. In this theory, beauty is seen as an experience that has nothing to do with artistic merit: Beautiful works of art may be without any merit whereas good art is not necessarily beautiful.

The theory resolves the apparent paradox of inborn and acquired preferences. For instance, infants prefer consonant melodies. According to the fluency account, this is because infants share perceptual equipment that make them process consonance in music more easily than dissonance. When children grow up, they are exposed to the music of their culture, resulting in culture-specific musical fluency. This familiarization explains why individuals from different cultures have different musical tastes. In addition, the theory helps explain why beauty (in a wide sense; perhaps elegance is better) is a cue for truth in mathematical problem solving and scientific discovery.

The theory and its implications have influenced theory and research in the psychology of perception

Perception

Perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of the environment by organizing and interpreting sensory information. All perception involves signals in the nervous system, which in turn result from physical stimulation of the sense organs...

, cognitive psychology

Cognitive psychology

Cognitive psychology is a subdiscipline of psychology exploring internal mental processes.It is the study of how people perceive, remember, think, speak, and solve problems.Cognitive psychology differs from previous psychological approaches in two key ways....

, social psychology

Social psychology

Social psychology is the scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. By this definition, scientific refers to the empirical method of investigation. The terms thoughts, feelings, and behaviors include all...

, empirical aesthetics

Aesthetics

Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...

, web design

Web design

Web design is the process of planning and creating a website. Text, images, digital media and interactive elements are used by web designers to produce the page seen on the web browser...

, marketing

Marketing

Marketing is the process used to determine what products or services may be of interest to customers, and the strategy to use in sales, communications and business development. It generates the strategy that underlies sales techniques, business communication, and business developments...

, finance

Finance

"Finance" is often defined simply as the management of money or “funds” management Modern finance, however, is a family of business activity that includes the origination, marketing, and management of cash and money surrogates through a variety of capital accounts, instruments, and markets created...

, and archeology.

Further reading

• Gazzaniga, M. S.
  Michael Gazzaniga
  Michael S. Gazzaniga is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he heads the new SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind. He is one of the leading researchers in cognitive neuroscience, the study of the neural basis of mind...
  
  (2008). Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique. New York: Ecco Books, Harper Collins.
• Song, S., & Schwarz, N. (2010, February). If it's easy to read, it's easy to do, pretty, good, and true: fluency effects on judgment, choice, and processing style. The Psychologist, 23, 108-111. http://www.thepsychologist.org.uk/archive/archive_home.cfm?volumeID=23&editionID=185&ArticleID=1629

External links

• A PowerPoint presentation on the processing fluency theory of aesthetic pleasure
• Improving Graphical Design - A practical guide how to use processing fluency to enhance graphical design.