Comparison of aesthetic preferences among Roman and Arabic script readers

Abstract

The systemic bias for aesthetic preferences demonstrated by prior research is thought to reflect neural organisation. Research on aesthetic preference and laterality has usually been conducted with participants who read a left-to-right Roman script, e.g., English. In order to determine if the aesthetic judgments were influenced by habitual scanning direction, we administered a geometric aesthetic preference test to 578 right-handed adults who represented a range of script experience, i.e., left-to-right Roman script readers (English); right-to-left Arabic script readers; bi-directional readers of Roman and Arabic scripts; and illiterates. We also administered an asymmetric chimeric faces test. Our findings showed that biases in aesthetic preference were influenced by script direction and pictorial dimensions. In a laterally balanced composition, participants preferred to begin their scan with the object representing Interest and terminate with the object representing Weight, the direction being determined by the script. In an unbalanced composition, participants tended to fixate on content, whether Interest or Weight, and move in a direction consistent with the script.