Watching (natural) beauty boosts task performance: testing the nature-as-reward hypothesis.

In two online studies, we tested the "nature-as-reward hypothesis", which suggests that superior cognitive task performance following nature exposure reflects a general performance improvement, driven by the reward value of beautiful things. In both between-subjects experiments, participants viewed either beautiful or less beautiful images for 10 s, comprising beautiful mountain photos (vs. less beautiful mountain drawings) in Study 1 and beautiful fractals (vs. less beautiful pixelated images) in Study 2. Following image exposure, participants engaged in a ticking task requiring them to freely tick up to 200 boxes. Participants had to complete four (Study 1) or five (Study 2) of such ticking tasks, with each task being preceded by either a beautiful or less beautiful image. In Study 1, for a subset of participants the ticking task was framed as a game. We found that in Study 1, ticking declined over the ticking rounds when participants had viewed less beautiful line drawings of mountains, while ticking performance remained unchanged over the rounds after seeing beautiful mountain images. However, when the ticking task was framed as a game, there was no significant difference in ticking performance between the two beauty conditions over the four ticking rounds. In Study 2, participants ticked more boxes over all ticking rounds after viewing images of beautiful fractals compared to less beautiful pixelated images. In line with the nature-as-reward hypothesis, these findings show that brief exposures to beautiful (nature) images can motivate to work and that framing tasks as a game can attenuate this beauty advantage.

AI-based chatbots in conversational commerce and their effects on product and price perceptions.

The rise of AI-based chatbots has gradually changed the way consumers shop. Natural language processing (NLP) technology and artificial intelligence (AI) are likely to accelerate this trend further. However, consumers still prefer to engage with humans and resist chatbots, which are often perceived as impersonal and lacking the human touch. While the predominant tendency is to make chatbots appear more humanlike, little is known about how anthropomorphic verbal design cues in chatbots influence perceived product personalization and willingness to pay a higher product price in conversational commerce contexts. In the current work, we set out to test this through one pre-test (N = 135) and two online experiments (N = 180 and 237). We find that anthropomorphism significantly and positively affects perceived product personalization, and that this effect is moderated by situational loneliness. Moreover, the results show that the interaction between anthropomorphism and situational loneliness has an impact on the willingness to pay a higher product price. The research findings can be used for future applications of AI-driven chatbots where there is a need to provide personalized and data-driven product recommendations.

Is There a "Gestalt Bias" in Indulgence? Subjectively Constructing Food Units Into Wholes (vs. Parts) Increases Desire to Eat and Actual Consumption.

In the present work we extend research into the unit bias effect and its extension-the portion size effect-by demonstrating the existence of a "Gestalt bias." Drawing on the tenets of Gestalt psychology, we show that a unit bias effect can be observed for food portions that are composed of identical basic units, but which are subjectively grouped into, or perceived as a Gestalt-a larger whole. In three studies, we find that such subjectively constructed food wholes constitute a new (perceptual) unit that is perceived bigger than the units it is constructed from, thereby prompting increased eating and desire to eat.

When complex is easy on the mind: Internal repetition of visual information in complex objects is a source of perceptual fluency.

Across 3 studies, we investigated whether visual complexity deriving from internally repeating visual information over many scale levels is a source of perceptual fluency. Such continuous repetition of visual information is formalized in fractal geometry and is a key-property of natural structures. In the first 2 studies, we exposed participants to 3-dimensional high-fractal versus low-fractal stimuli, respectively characterized by a relatively high versus low degree of internal repetition of visual information. Participants evaluated high-fractal stimuli as more complex and fascinating than their low-fractal counterparts. We assessed ease of processing by asking participants to solve effortful puzzles during and after exposure to high-fractal versus low-fractal stimuli. Across both studies, we found that puzzles presented during and after seeing high-fractal stimuli were perceived as the easiest ones to solve and were solved more accurately and faster than puzzles associated with the low-fractal stimuli. In Study 3, we ran the Dot Probe Procedure to rule out that the findings from Study 1 and Study 2 reflected differences in attentional bias between the high-fractal and low-fractal stimuli, rather than perceptual fluency. Overall, our findings confirm that complexity deriving from internal repetition of visual information can be easy on the mind.

An exploratory study into the effects of extraordinary nature on emotions, mood, and prosociality.

Environmental psychology research has demonstrated that exposure to mundane natural environments can be psychologically beneficial, and can, for instance, improve individuals' mood and concentration. However, little research has yet examined the psychological benefits of extraordinary, awe-evoking kinds of nature, such as spectacular mountain scenes or impressive waterfalls. In this study, we aimed to address the underrepresentation of such extraordinary nature in research on human-nature interactions. Specifically, we examined whether watching a picture slideshow of awesome as opposed to mundane nature differentially affected individuals' emotions, mood, social value orientation (SVO), and their willingness to donate something to others. Our analyses revealed that, compared to mundane nature and a neutral condition, watching awesome natural scenes and phenomena had some unique and pronounced emotional effects (e.g., feeling small and humble), triggered the most mood improvement, and led to a more prosocial SVO. We found that participants' willingness to donate did not differ significantly for any of the conditions.

New methods for assessing the fascinating nature of nature experiences.

In recent years, numerous environmental psychology studies have demonstrated that contact with nature as opposed to urban settings can improve an individual's mood, can lead to increased levels of vitality, and can offer an opportunity to recover from stress. According to Attention Restoration Theory (ART) the restorative potential of natural environments is situated in the fact that nature can replenish depleted attentional resources. This replenishment takes place, in part, because nature is deemed to be a source of fascination, with fascination being described as having an "attentional", an "affective" and an "effort" dimension. However, the claim that fascination with nature involves these three dimensions is to a large extent based on intuition or derived from introspection-based measurement methods, such as self-reports. In three studies, we aimed to more objectively assess whether these three dimensions indeed applied to experiences related to natural environments, before any (attentional) depletion has taken place. The instruments that were used were: (a) the affect misattribution procedure (Study 1), (b) the dot probe paradigm (Study 2) and (c) a cognitively effortful task (Study 3). These instrument were respectively aimed at verifying the affective, attentional and effort dimension of fascination. Overall, the results provide objective evidence for the claims made within the ART framework, that natural as opposed to urban settings are affectively positive (cfr., affective dimension) and that people have an attentional bias to natural (rather than urban) environments (cfr., attentional dimension). The results regarding the effort dimension are less straightforward, and suggest that this dimension only becomes important in sufficiently difficult cognitive tasks.