Beauty in the blink of an eye: The time course of aesthetic experiences.

Under normal circumstances, perception runs very fast and seemingly automatic. In just a few ms, we go from sensory features to perceiving objects. This fast time course does not only apply to general perceptual aspects but also to what we call higher-level judgements. Inspired by the study on 'very first impressions' by Bar, Neta, and Linz (2006, Emotion, 6, 269) the current research examined the speed and time course of three aspects of the aesthetic experience, namely beauty, specialness, and impressiveness. Participants were presented with 54 reproductions of paintings that covered a wide variety of artistic styles and contents. Presentation times were 10, 50, 100 and 500 ms in Experiment 1 and 20, 30 and 40 ms in Experiment 2. Our results not only show that consistent aesthetic judgements can be formed based on very brief glances of information, but that this speed of aesthetic impression formation also differs between different aesthetic judgements. Apparently, impressiveness judgements require longer exposure times than impressions of beauty or specialness. The results provide important evidence for our understanding of the time course of aesthetic experiences.

Scale Separation Reliability: What Does It Mean in the Context of Comparative Judgment?

Comparative judgment (CJ) is an alternative method for assessing competences based on Thurstone's law of comparative judgment. Assessors are asked to compare pairs of students work (representations) and judge which one is better on a certain competence. These judgments are analyzed using the Bradly-Terry-Luce model resulting in logit estimates for the representations. In this context, the Scale Separation Reliability (SSR), coming from Rasch modeling, is typically used as reliability measure. But, to the knowledge of the authors, it has never been systematically investigated if the meaning of the SSR can be transferred from Rasch to CJ. As the meaning of the reliability is an important question for both assessment theory and practice, the current study looks into this. A meta-analysis is performed on 26 CJ assessments. For every assessment, split-halves are performed based on assessor. The rank orders of the whole assessment and the halves are correlated and compared with SSR values using Bland-Altman plots. The correlation between the halves of an assessment was compared with the SSR of the whole assessment showing that the SSR is a good measure for split-half reliability. Comparing the SSR of one of the halves with the correlation between the two respective halves showed that the SSR can also be interpreted as an interrater correlation. Regarding SSR as expressing a correlation with the truth, the results are mixed.