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research article

Aesthetic experience enhances first-person spatial representation

Babo-Rebelo, Mariana  
•
Chatel, Marie
•
Tabacchi, Serena
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October 19, 2022
Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences Of The United States Of America (PNAS)

Episodic autobiographical memories are characterized by a spatial context and an affective component. But how do affective and spatial aspects interact? Does affect modulate the way we encode the spatial context of events? We investigated how one element of affect, namely aesthetic liking, modulates memory for location, in three online experiments (n = 124, 79, and 80). Participants visited a professionally curated virtual art exhibition. They then relocated previously viewed artworks on the museum map and reported how much they liked them. Across all experiments, liking an artwork was associated with increased ability to recall the wall on which it was hung. The effect was not explained by viewing time and appeared to modulate recognition speed. The liking-wall memory effect remained when participants attended to abstractness, rather than liking, and when testing occurred 24 h after the museum visit. Liking also modulated memory for the room where a work of art was hung, but this effect primarily involved reduced room memory for disliked artworks. Further, the liking-wall memory effect remained after controlling for effects of room memory. Recalling the wall requires recalling one's facing direction, so our findings suggest that positive aesthetic experiences enhance first-person spatial representations. More generally, a first-person component of positive affect transfers to wider spatial representation and facilitates the encoding of locations in a subject-centered reference frame. Affect and spatial representations are therefore important, and linked, elements of sentience and subjectivity. Memories of aesthetic experiences are also spatial memories of how we encountered a work of art. This linkage may have implications for museum design.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.1073/pnas.2201540119
Web of Science ID

WOS:001016355800005

Author(s)
Babo-Rebelo, Mariana  
Chatel, Marie
Tabacchi, Serena
Namiq, Allen
Travers, Eoin
James, Kadine
Haggard, Patrick
Date Issued

2022-10-19

Publisher

National Academy of Sciences

Published in
Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences Of The United States Of America (PNAS)
Volume

119

Issue

43

Article Number

e2201540119

Subjects

Multidisciplinary Sciences

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Science & Technology - Other Topics

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aesthetics

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spatial representation

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first person

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affect

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memory

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neural mechanisms

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vantage point

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cognitive map

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emotion

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context

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appreciation

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perspective

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valuation

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pictures

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
LNCO  
Available on Infoscience
July 17, 2023
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/199178
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