Rolf Reber | |
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| Born | 17 May 1959 Basel, Switzerland |
| Nationality | Swiss |
| Known for | Processing fluency theory of aesthetic pleasure |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Psychology |
| Institutions | University of Oslo |
Rolf Reber (born 17 May 1959) is a professor of psychology at the University of Oslo.
Rolf Reber is known for his research on processing fluency, especially the processing fluency theory of aesthetic pleasure he developed together with Norbert Schwarz from the University of Michigan and Piotr Winkielman from the University of California at San Diego. [1] The core assumption of the theory is that an audience draws aesthetic pleasure from the fact that an object can be processed easily, especially if a viewer remains unaware of the source of this processing ease.
This theory resolves an apparent contradiction between the uniformity of musical preferences in infants and the cultural differences in musical tastes in adults. Infants prefer consonant melodies because newborns share biological mechanisms that make them process consonance in music more easily than dissonance. When children grow up, they are exposed to the music of their culture, explaining why individuals from different cultures have different musical tastes. In addition, the research found that processing fluency influences both affect [2] and the judged truth of statements, [3] suggesting that ease of processing is a common underlying experience in both perceived beauty and judged truth.
This observation fits anecdotal observations that mathematicians and scientists sometimes use the beauty of a theorem as an indication of its truth. This idea has been explored in more recent work. [4] Processing fluency and its effects can help explain the "Aha"-experience. [5] [6] The processing fluency theory of aesthetic pleasure has influenced work in psychology, [7] [8] [9] philosophy, [10] marketing, [11] [12] and finance. [13] An extension of the processing fluency theory takes account of the fact that many artworks are difficult to process. Nevertheless, audiences interpret these artworks in a meaningful way and like them. [14]
More recently, Rolf Reber and his collaborators have developed and explored Example Choice, an instructional technique designed to increase relevance and student interest in learning abstract principles in mathematics and science. Students are given examples from different topics that all address the same underlying principle, and a student has to choose the example that interests him or her most. The chosen example is then used to explain the formal principle. This technique is supposed to connect the formal principle to students' interest. Research has shown that students become more interested and spend more time learning the principle when they can choose an example than when they are given an example. [15]
Rolf Reber is the author of the book Critical Feeling that introduces the concept of critical feeling which extends the notion of critical thinking [16] and two popular science books in German, among them Kleine Psychologie des Alltäglichen (A brief psychology of everyday life) which has been translated into Norwegian, Korean and Chinese. [17]
Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of beauty and the nature of taste; and functions as the philosophy of art. Aesthetics examines the philosophy of aesthetic value, which is determined by critical judgments of artistic taste; thus, the function of aesthetics is the "critical reflection on art, culture and nature".
Beauty is commonly described as a feature of objects that makes them pleasurable to perceive. Such objects include landscapes, sunsets, humans and works of art. Beauty, art and taste are the main subjects of aesthetics, one of the major branches of philosophy. As a positive aesthetic value, it is contrasted with ugliness as its negative counterpart.
Critical psychology is a perspective on psychology that draws extensively on critical theory. Critical psychology challenges the assumptions, theories and methods of mainstream psychology and attempts to apply psychological understandings in different ways.
A heuristic or heuristic technique is any approach to problem solving that employs a pragmatic method that is not fully optimized, perfected, or rationalized, but is nevertheless "good enough" as an approximation or attribute substitution. Where finding an optimal solution is impossible or impractical, heuristic methods can be used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution. Heuristics can be mental shortcuts that ease the cognitive load of making a decision.
Heuristic reasoning is often based on induction, or on analogy[.] [...] Induction is the process of discovering general laws [...] Induction tries to find regularity and coherence [...] Its most conspicuous instruments are generalization, specialization, analogy. [...] Heuristic discusses human behavior in the face of problems [...that have been] preserved in the wisdom of proverbs.
Gestalt psychology, gestaltism, or configurationism is a school of psychology and a theory of perception that emphasises the processing of entire patterns and configurations, and not merely individual components. It emerged in the early twentieth century in Austria and Germany as a rejection of basic principles of Wilhelm Wundt's and Edward Titchener's elementalist and structuralist psychology.
Max Wertheimer was a psychologist who was one of the three founders of Gestalt psychology, along with Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler. He is known for his book, Productive Thinking, and for conceiving the phi phenomenon as part of his work in Gestalt psychology.
The mere-exposure effect is a psychological phenomenon by which people tend to develop liking or disliking for things merely because they are familiar with them. In social psychology, this effect is sometimes called the familiarity principle. The effect has been demonstrated with many kinds of things, including words, Chinese characters, paintings, pictures of faces, geometric figures, and sounds. In studies of interpersonal attraction, the more often people see a person, the more pleasing and likeable they find that person.
The spacing effect demonstrates that learning is more effective when study sessions are spaced out. This effect shows that more information is encoded into long-term memory by spaced study sessions, also known as spaced repetition or spaced presentation, than by massed presentation ("cramming").
Neuroesthetics is a relatively recent sub-discipline of applied aesthetics. Empirical aesthetics takes a scientific approach to the study of aesthetic experience of art, music, or any object that can give rise to aesthetic judgments. Neuroesthetics is a term coined by Semir Zeki in 1999 and received its formal definition in 2002 as the scientific study of the neural bases for the contemplation and creation of a work of art. Anthropologists and evolutionary biologists alike have accumulated evidence suggesting that human interest in, and creation of, art evolved as an evolutionarily necessary mechanism for survival as early as the 9th and 10th century in Gregorian monks and Native Americans. Neuroesthetics uses neuroscience to explain and understand the aesthetic experiences at the neurological level. The topic attracts scholars from many disciplines including neuroscientists, art historians, artists, art therapists and psychologists.
Mathematical psychology is an approach to psychological research that is based on mathematical modeling of perceptual, thought, cognitive and motor processes, and on the establishment of law-like rules that relate quantifiable stimulus characteristics with quantifiable behavior. The mathematical approach is used with the goal of deriving hypotheses that are more exact and thus yield stricter empirical validations. There are five major research areas in mathematical psychology: learning and memory, perception and psychophysics, choice and decision-making, language and thinking, and measurement and scaling.
The psychology of art is the scientific study of cognitive and emotional processes precipitated by the sensory perception of aesthetic artefacts, such as viewing a painting or touching a sculpture. It is an emerging multidisciplinary field of inquiry, closely related to the psychology of aesthetics, including neuroaesthetics.
Mathematical beauty is the aesthetic pleasure derived from the abstractness, purity, simplicity, depth or orderliness of mathematics. Mathematicians may express this pleasure by describing mathematics as beautiful or describe mathematics as an art form, or, at a minimum, as a creative activity.
The eureka effect refers to the common human experience of suddenly understanding a previously incomprehensible problem or concept. Some research describes the Aha! effect as a memory advantage, but conflicting results exist as to where exactly it occurs in the brain, and it is difficult to predict under what circumstances one can predict an Aha! moment.
Perceptual learning is learning better perception skills such as differentiating two musical tones from one another or categorizations of spatial and temporal patterns relevant to real-world expertise. Examples of this may include reading, seeing relations among chess pieces, and knowing whether or not an X-ray image shows a tumor.
Processing fluency is the ease with which information is processed. Perceptual fluency is the ease of processing stimuli based on manipulations to perceptual quality. Retrieval fluency is the ease with which information can be retrieved from memory.
The processing fluency theory of aesthetic pleasure is a theory in psychological aesthetics on how people experience beauty. Processing fluency is the ease with which information is processed in the human mind.
The rhyme-as-reason effect, also known as the Eaton–Rosen phenomenon, is a cognitive bias where sayings or aphorisms are perceived as more accurate or truthful when they rhyme.
In psychology of art, the relationship between art and emotion has newly been the subject of extensive study thanks to the intervention of esteemed art historian Alexander Nemerov. Emotional or aesthetic responses to art have previously been viewed as basic stimulus response, but new theories and research have suggested that these experiences are more complex and able to be studied experimentally. Emotional responses are often regarded as the keystone to experiencing art, and the creation of an emotional experience has been argued as the purpose of artistic expression. Research has shown that the neurological underpinnings of perceiving art differ from those used in standard object recognition. Instead, brain regions involved in the experience of emotion and goal setting show activation when viewing art.
Experimental aesthetics is a field of psychology founded by Gustav Theodor Fechner in the 19th century. According to Fechner, aesthetics is an experiential perception which is empirically comprehensible in light of the characteristics of the subject undergoing the experience and those of the object. Experimental aesthetics is the second oldest research area in psychology, psychophysics being the only field which is older. In his central work Introduction to Aesthetics Fechner describes his empirical approach extensively and in detail. Experimental aesthetics is characterized by a subject-based, inductive approach.
In aesthetics, "unity in variety" is a principle declaring that in art beauty can come from the variety of diverse components grouped together thus creating a fused impression as a whole. In the more broad meaning, to find pleasure in interaction with any set of objects, humans need to perceive order among the parts of the set. Human brain is wired to see the connections, so finding such groups feels aesthetically pleasing.
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