The intrinsic variance of beauty judgment

Pombo, Maria and Brielmann, Aenne A and Pelli, Denis G (2023) The intrinsic variance of beauty judgment. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 85. pp. 1355-1373. ISSN 1943-3921

Text The intrinsic variance of beauty judgment.pdf - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (2MB)

Abstract

Recall memory and sequential dependence threaten the independence of successive beauty ratings. Such independence is usually assumed when using repeated measures to estimate the intrinsic variance of a rating. We call “intrinsic” the variance of all possible responses that the participant could give on a trial. Variance arises within and across participants. In attributing the measured variance to sources, the first step is to assess how much is intrinsic. In seven experiments, we measure how much of the variability across beauty ratings can be attributed to recall memory and sequential dependence. With a set size of one, memory is a problem and contributes half the measured variance. However, we showed that for both beauty and ellipticity, with set size of nine or more, recall memory causes a mere 10% increase in the variance of repeated ratings. Moreover, we showed that as long as the stimuli are diverse (i.e., represent different object categories), sequential dependence does not affect the variance of beauty ratings. Lastly, the variance of beauty ratings increases in proportion to the 0.15 power of stimulus set size. We show that the beauty rating of a stimulus in a diverse set is affected by the stimulus set size and not the value of other stimuli. Overall, we conclude that the variance of repeated ratings is a good way to estimate the intrinsic variance of a beauty rating of a stimulus in a diverse set.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information and Comments:	Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material.
Keywords:	Recall memory · Sequential dependence · Aesthetics · Repeated measures, Intrinsic variability, Subjective beauty judgments
Faculty / Department:	Faculty of Human and Digital Sciences > School of Psychology
SWORD Depositor:	RISE Symplectic
Depositing User:	RISE Symplectic
Date Deposited:	13 Feb 2026 10:08
Last Modified:	13 Feb 2026 10:08
URI:	https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/4850

Actions (login required)

View Item