Human Affect and Typography Aesthetics - On Qualitative Aspects of Mnemonics at the Intersection of...

01/09/16 MEi:CogSci, Vienna

Human Affect

Mag.a Jeanna Nikolov-Ramirez

Aesthetics On Qualitative Aspects of Mnemonics at the Intersection of Image and Text

How scientists see text

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How designers see text

Universal “Laws” of aesthetics

“…many have wondered whether there are some universal [aesthetic] principles. Do we have an innate "grammar" of aesthetics analogous to the syntactic universals for languages proposed by linguist Noam Chomsky…? The answer may be yes. We suggest that universal “laws” of aesthetics may cut across not only cultural boundaries but across species boundaries as well” (Ramachandran & Rogers–Ramachandran, 2006)

“To provide more than a general definition of the subject matter of aesthetics is immensely difficult. Indeed, it could be said that self-definition has been the major task of modern aesthetics. …”

Encyclopedia Britannica

Questions •  In what ways are

knowledge development and meaning affected by visual qualities?

•  How can visual quality help us learn and memorize better?

•  How can science be conducted/communicated more effectively?

•  How is valence connected to design features in science communication?

Emotion at core of neurological processing of vision §  Webpage design study (Capota et al., 2007) found that

participants could judge the aesthetic appeal of a website even before the visual signal could reach the areas of the brain responsible for conscious visual perception.

§  Conscious decisions may be influenced by emotions that are formed preconsciously in response to visual stimuli.

§  “Emotion is at the very core of the neurological processing of vision” (Vuilleumier, P. & Driver, J., 2007).

Design and Mnemonics

“if a typeface evokes certain thoughts or emotions that do not match the text it depicts, readers may falsely remember textual material; in other words, their reading comprehension may suffer.

•  Mnemonics: •  learning strategies that can improve the initial learning

and later recall of information. Bellezza (1981) •  “the study and development of systems for improving

and assisting the memory”

Visual tone may mislead readers much as voice tone may mislead listeners.” Brumberger (2004)

Global processing

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Typographic Styles

Typography and Affect

Study Design

§  Eye tracking experiment, semi-structured interviews, self-report

•  10 motives, 3 versions (scientific rather abstract terms)

•  Alternating “neutral” and aesthetic typographic stimuli

•  Each motive is seen only once, Duration: 20 sec

•  60-100 subjects (design students, established scientists)

•  Possible EEG

Recordings

•  SMI RED Contact-free, remote-controlled infrared eye camera

•  Automatic eye and headtracker •  Temporal resolution: 60 Hz •  SW: ExperimentCenter, SoSciSurvey,

EyeTrace.

Hypotheses §  Emotion is involved in interpreting visual information

(typestyles)

§  People have the same or somewhat similar interpretation of visual information (typestyles designs) irrespectively of their background or age

§  There is a link between typestyle construction features and emotion responses.

§  Typestyle construction features influence affect for purposes of interpreting visual information.

Questions Q1: Does viewing specific typefaces produce emotional responses? Q2: When viewing typestyle designs, do all subjects irrespectively of age, gender and background feel the same emotions? Q3: Are certain emotions and concepts predominantly associated with the formative design features of typefaces - differences in classification (serif, sans serif, script), terminal construction (angular or rounded), character width (condensed or extended), and weight (light or bold)?

Mapping affective states

“An alternative method of characterizing affective states and emotions, most often applied to moods and basic emotions, is to focus on the underlying, often physiologically correlated factors (e.g. arousal) and map these onto distinct dimensions. Several such two- or three-dimensional sets have been proposed, including positive and negative affect (Watson & Clark, 1992), energetic and tense arousal (Thayer, 1996), hedonic tone, energy and tension (Matthews, Jones, & Chamberlain, 1990), and valence and arousal (Watson & Tellegen, 1985; Russell, 1979)”.

Koch (2011)

The Geneva Emotion Wheel

Non-verbal responses

PrEmo™ interactive animated characters http://www.premo-online.com/en/how-does-it-work/

Challenges

§  Understanding the emotional component and context of science communication

§  Neural underpinnings of observing visual content and reading §  Social nature of visual design §  Evolutionary origin of shape/style informing meaning

References 1.  Brown, S. (2011). The Miseducation of the Doodle. A List Apart

Magazine, 25. 2.  Brumberger, E. (2004). The rhetoric of typography: Effects on

reading time, reading comprehension, and perceptions of ethos. Technical Communication, 51(1), 13-24.

3.  Brunel, Frédéric F., and Rishtee Kumar. "Design and the big five: Linking visual product aesthetics to product personality." Advances in consumer research 34 (2007): 238-239.

4.  H. Leder, "Next steps in neuroaesthetics: Which processes and processingstages to study?." Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, vol.7, no. 1, p.27, 2013 [Online]. Available: APA PsycNET,http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/aca/7/1/27/. [Accessed May, 31, 2016].

5.  B. E. Koch, “Human emotion response to typographic design,” Ph.D.dissertation, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA, 2011.

6.  L. Malafouris “The aesthetics of material engagement,” in Situated Aesthetics: Art Beyond the Skin, R. Manzotti, Ed. Exeter: Imprint Academic,2011, pp.123. 01/09/16 MEi:CogSci MoPE Nikolov 2014.12.17 25

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Jeanna Nikolov-Ramirez

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Human Affect and Typography Aesthetics - On Qualitative Aspects of Mnemonics at the Intersection of...

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