Your Ears Don’t Change What Your Eyes Like: People Can Independently Report the Pleasure of Music and Images

Frame, Jessica and Gugliano, Maria and Bai, Elena and Brielmann, Aenne and Belfi, Amy M (2023) Your Ears Don’t Change What Your Eyes Like: People Can Independently Report the Pleasure of Music and Images. Journal of Experimental Psychology Human Perception & Performance, 49. pp. 774-785. ISSN 0096-1523

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Abstract

Observers can make independent aesthetic judgments of at least two images presented briefly and simultaneously. However, it is unknown whether this is the case for two stimuli of different sensory modalities. Here, we investigated whether individuals can judge auditory and visual stimuli independently, and whether stimulus duration influences such judgments. Participants (<i>N</i> = 120, across two experiments and a replication) saw images of paintings and heard excerpts of music, presented simultaneously for 2 s (Experiment 1) or 5 s (Experiment 2). After the stimuli were presented, participants rated how much pleasure they felt from the stimulus (music, image, or combined pleasure of both, depending on which was cued) on a 9-point scale. Finally, participants completed a baseline rating block where they rated each stimulus in isolation. We used the baseline ratings to predict ratings of audiovisual presentations. Across both experiments, the root mean square errors (RMSEs) obtained from leave-one-out-cross-validation analyses showed that people's ratings of music and images were unbiased by the simultaneously presented other stimulus, and ratings of both were best described as the arithmetic mean of the ratings from the individual presentations at the end of the experiment. This pattern of results replicates previous findings on simultaneously presented images, indicating that participants can ignore the pleasure of an irrelevant stimulus regardless of the sensory modality and duration of stimulus presentation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information and Comments:	© American Psychological Association, 2023. This paper is not the copy of record and may not exactly replicate the authoritative document published in the APA journal. The final article is available at https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0001118
Keywords:	music, aesthetics, pleasure, reward
Faculty / Department:	Faculty of Human and Digital Sciences > School of Psychology
SWORD Depositor:	RISE Symplectic
Depositing User:	RISE Symplectic
Date Deposited:	13 Feb 2026 10:04
Last Modified:	13 Feb 2026 10:04
URI:	https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/4849

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