Aesthetic Processing Differences Between Representational and Defamiliarized Photographic Images During Initial and Repeated Presentations: Evidence from ERPs

Objectives: Repeated presentation may enhance processing fluency, but as novelty wanes, it may also reduce viewers’ cognitive engagement. Given that representational photographic images (RPIs) and defamiliarized photographic images (DPIs) differ in semantic clarity, it remains unclear whether repeated viewing differentially affects viewers’ explicit aesthetic judgments and neural processing during aesthetic judgments of these images. Methods: This study adopted event-related potentials (ERPs), and examined 40 participants’ aesthetic judgments of RPI and DPI during initial and repeated presentation. The behavioral measure was the proportion of images judged as “beautiful,” and ERP analyses focused on FN400 and early (500–1200 ms), mid (1200–3000 ms), and late (3000–5000 ms) LPP components. Results: Behavioral results showed that RPIs were judged as “beautiful” more often than DPIs, and presentation order did not significantly alter explicit aesthetic judgments. ERP results showed that repetition effects differed by image type: for RPIs, FN400 amplitudes were more positive and middle and late LPP amplitudes were reduced during the second presentation, whereas the repetition effect was not statistically significant for DPIs. Conclusions: Repeated presentation did not significantly alter explicit aesthetic judgments, but ERP repetition effects were observed mainly for RPIs and varied across processing stages. These preliminary findings suggest that the effects of repeated presentation on aesthetic judgments may be stage-dependent and stimulus-dependent. Future research should further disentangle presentation order from block order and more strictly match low-level visual features to test these effects.