Aesthetics: State of the Art and Future Perspectives

This special issue, guest edited by Helmut Leder, gathers research on how people respond to and judge beauty across art and design. Leder opens the collection with an editorial, and the papers that follow pull together methods from experimental psychology, studies of expertise, design theory, and the measurement of physical form.

Paul Locher examines what eye movement recordings can tell us about the moment someone engages with a piece of visual art. By tracking where the eyes go during an aesthetic episode, he argues, researchers gain a way to put subjective experience under empirical observation.

Benno Belke, Helmut Leder, and Dorothee Augustin look at what shapes appreciation of abstract paintings. Their work weighs the influence of explicit information about style, a viewer's prior knowledge of art, and their affective state at the time of viewing. Augustin and Leder follow with a separate study of art expertise, mapping the concepts experts use and the conceptual spaces those concepts occupy.

Turning from fine art to designed objects, Paul Hekkert sets out principles of pleasure in design, asking what makes an object satisfying to perceive and use. Claus-Christian Carbon, Florian Hutzler, and Michael Minge take up innovativeness in design, measuring responses through eye movements and pupillometry to see how novelty registers in a viewer.

The final contribution shifts to the human body itself. Katrin Schaefer, Bernhard Fink, Karl Grammer, Philipp Mitteroecker, Philipp Gunz, and Fred L. Bookstein treat facial and bodily attractiveness as a matter of shape, analyzing female appearance through the geometry of form rather than impression alone.