A systematic and quantitative study of aesthetics for both theoretical understanding and human factors application is needed to answer questions such as, “How do people make aesthetic judgments?” and “How do people perceive individual aesthetic attributes, and what effect does this perception have on performance?” This paper reports a binary aesthetic choice experiment whose objective was to examine the effect of the number of different aesthetic attributes on aesthetic perception of advertisements. A methodology is presented that quantitatively distinguishes displays based upon their individual aesthetic attributes and utilizes the performance measure of response time to examine the process of aesthetic judgment. Results show that when comparing two stimuli, an increased difference among aesthetic stimuli decreases processing and response time. Additionally, there is a limit in the number of different attributes participants consider when making aesthetic judgments.
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