Attentional dynamics drive aesthetic preferences for scenes: Evidence from ‘attentional transplants’

People often disagree when aesthetically evaluating the same scene. Here we propose that aesthetic disagreements are caused in part by differences in visual attention. We demonstrate this using a new method of ‘attentional transplants’. In Experiment 1, 50 online ‘donors’ viewed scenes through a cursor-controlled window and rated how aesthetically pleasing each was. 100 new ‘recipients’ then viewed the same scenes through a window which passively replayed the viewing pattern of either the donor who liked the scene best, or the donor who liked it least. Recipients gave substantially higher ratings to a scene when they saw it via the viewing pattern of the donor who liked (vs. disliked) the scene. In subsequent experiments, we replicated this effect, and found that attention patterns which drive greater liking allow better prediction of upcoming visual information. We conclude that disagreements in aesthetic preferences are partly caused by differences in how we attend.