The sense of agency, the internal feeling of controlling one's actions and their outcomes, fundamentally shapes user interaction in virtual environments. Although extensively studied for its subjective impact, agency's implicit yet critical role in guiding visual-spatial attention has been largely overlooked. This study investigated whether the sense of agency, conferred by prior active control, enhances subsequent visual search efficiency for the previously controlled stimulus under conditions of attentional, temporal, and spatial perturbation. Our results show that agency-driven attentional benefits are remarkably robust, persisting despite competing salient visual distractors, delayed outcomes, and changes in spatial layout. Furthermore, when a delay was introduced between the control and visual search, the agency effect attenuated for targets presented beyond the operators’ peripersonal space. These findings provide valuable insights for constructing immersive user experiences and advancing theoretical frameworks in human-computer interaction, suggesting efficient strategies to support sustained user engagement in virtual and augmented reality.

The Biophilia hypothesis emphasizes humanity's intrinsic desire to connect with nature, which in turn nurtures authenticity. Architectural designs that echo natural patterns can evoke feelings of wholeness, inspiration, and comfort, as proposed by architectural theorist Christopher Alexander in his Theory of Living Structure. This study empirically examined the connection between architecture and the authentic self. Participants engaged with Chinese philosophical texts from Chuang Tzu and The Analects of Confucius to explore their authentic selves. They then evaluated image pairs, assessing preference, liveliness, and self-connection, with one image exemplifying living structures characterized by multiple scales, varied patterns, and interconnected centers. Our participants exhibited a strong preference for living structures. Notably, individuals with lower susceptibility to external influence, an essential component of authenticity, were more likely to perceive living structures as self-connected. Our findings offer valuable insights into human-centered architectural design aimed at fostering authentic living.

In a temporally extended perceptual encounter with an artwork, an ideal challenge presents a manageable degree of unpredictability. This unpredictability triggers emotional satisfaction derived from resolving perceptual uncertainties, which, in turn, leads to rewarding experiences that motivate further engagement. Here we simulated and amplified perceptual unpredictability across three stages: a blurred version of the artwork, a clear version, and prolonged exposure to the clear artwork, and measured viewers' dynamic emotional responses throughout this unfolding process. Our findings reveal significant associations between individuals' aesthetic experiences and shifts in their emotional responses, specifically concerning pleasure and arousal. Additionally, Participants exhibited stronger emotional changes related to pleasure and dominance when unfolding realist paintings (certainty expected), compared to surrealist artworks (uncertainty expected). Overall, the results suggest that viewers generally appreciate unpredictability and experiences that transcend their preconceived expectations, fostering deeper exploration of the scientific inquiry into the predictive processing in human aesthetic appreciation.

Utilizing visualization techniques for opinion mining and sentiment exploration of social media texts is a pivotal concern in the visualization field. Research predominantly concentrates on the collective expression of numerous users on popular topics within the public domain. However, there is a need to focus on changing or evolving sentiments for individuals. This paper tries to integrate sentiment analysis with visualization techniques to enable individual users to visually explore the underlying sentiment stories behind their social media texts. Therefore, the SentiSand system is designed and developed based on user requirements. It employs innovative visual design to transform the text from users' social media into a series of visual stories to facilitate users tracking their sentiment changes. The system provides the functionalities of visualizing the overview of the sentiment evolution over a specified period, the sentiment polarity distribution, and words used over that period as well. In a user study, eighteen participants with diverse backgrounds are invited to evaluate the system. The results demonstrate that SentiSand can effectively and intuitively depict sentiment states and changes. All participants gave the system high ratings across dimensions of creativity, practicality, and narrative coherence. Overall, this paper introduces a novel perspective and methodology for visualizing personal sentiments, thereby contributing to an enhanced comprehension of and intervention in individual sentiment states.

In the digital era, traditional methods of historical learning are undergoing a transition, as there is a growing demand for intuitive and visually engaging approaches. Vi-sualization, particularly timeline-based visualization, is critical in bridging the gap between extensive and complex historical events and history learners due to its intuitive features. Despite the advances in existing timeline visualization tools, they often face challenges: visualization creators spend much time in the materials preparation stage, especially for designers unfamiliar with the history; the lack of flexible interaction limits users from designing customized representations, which decreases the user's interest. To address these issues, we have developed Create3DHistory, a system that leverages the advanced Artificial Intelligence Generated Content and visualization technologies, enabling users to easily generate historical events content and create 3D and 2D historical event timeline representation. Users only need to input the name of a historical event, and the system will automatically generate corresponding content and deploy it onto the timeline representation. Moreover, users can edit the generated content or upload self-prepared multimedia materials for customized event visualization. The user study has demonstrated that Create3DHistory can effectively assist users in customizing personalized historical event timelines. Overall, the proposed tool simplifies the timeline creation process using AIGC technology, providing an overview and detailed information on-demand functions for various tasks.

Previous research indicates that spatial cognition limits the human ability to appreciate complexity in aesthetics. As early and middle childhood are critical periods for developing this ability, this study investigates how spatial cognition influences developmental changes in children's aesthetic preferences for abstract patterns and paintings. We presented 184 elementary school children with geometric patterns of varying symmetry and abstract paintings, asking them to select their preferences. Results showed distinct developmental trends: younger children preferred horizontal and rotational symmetry, while older children developed a broader preference for vertical and diagonal symmetry. Furthermore, stronger spatial processing ability predicted a greater preference for complex geometric patterns, though not for complexity in artistic compositions. These findings highlight the crucial role of spatial cognition in the development of aesthetic judgment and provide valuable insights for designing educational tools.

Human understanding is fundamentally metaphorical; we often use knowledge from one domain, like audition, to make sense of abstract concepts in others, such as vision and emotion. This study examined how auditory experiences, specifically ascending and descending pitch, influence facial emotion recognition. In the task, 56 college students were presented with an initial face paired with either an ascending or descending pitch for 500 ms, followed by a second face. Results showed that an ascending pitch induced an illusory positive bias in interpreting the subsequent emotion, while a descending pitch induced a negative bias. These findings on the role of non-linguistic pitch in emotional recognition offer valuable insights for enhancing communicative clarity and developing more intuitive, cross-modal user experiences.

Previous studies have suggested human preference for artworks with greater image complexity. Here we aim to further explore the impact of complexity on aesthetic experiences in both visual and auditory domains. Twenty-eight college students were tasked with viewing pairs of abstract paintings by Ely Raman and indicating their preference using a two-alternative forced choice procedure. Following this, they listened to Western tonal music for five seconds and completed a simple choice reaction task. A longer reaction time was taken as an indication of greater immersion in the music and, consequently, a stronger preference. Our findings confirmed a preference for complexity in both visual and auditory modalities. Additionally, a notable correlation was observed between the inclination towards complexity in the visual domain and that in the auditory domain, lending support to the Taste Typicality in explaining individual differences in aesthetic experiences.

Individuals vary widely in their capacity for visual imagery, with some possessing exceptionally vivid mental imaginations while others struggle to form clear mental images of visual stimuli. These differences may contribute to the considerable variation in aesthetic appreciation of visual artwork. Here we aim to explore the association between visual imagery ability and the aesthetic appreciation of Dunhuang murals, with a particular focus on the role of color in this association. Forty-one participants were enlisted to assess 24 sets of murals in both their original color and black-and-white versions. The findings revealed a general preference for the vibrant original murals, but a deeper level of understanding for the achromatic images. This suggests that an increase in cognitive processing difficulty, such as the absence of color in the Dunhuang murals, may have facilitated a more profound comprehension and appreciation of the murals. Furthermore, individuals with superior mental imagery skills exhibited a more profound understanding of the achromatic murals compared to those with less vivid imagery skills. The implications of this research are diverse and relevant to practical applications, particularly in the fields of education, museum curation, and digital imaging, as it caters to diverse audience characteristics and expectations.

Two prominent hypotheses have been proposed to explain the intriguing connection between music and color. The Direct Link Hypothesis posits a direct correlation between the two domains based on their intrinsic physical properties. In contrast, the Emotion Mediation Hypothesis suggests that individuals form associations between colors and music based on shared emotional experiences. In this study, we recruited sixty-three college students to match six different colors with ten distinct music excerpts derived from both Western and Chinese cultural contexts. Participants also evaluated the emotional responses to both the music and the colors. Our findings uncovered considerable variation in color preferences associated with most music excerpts, challenging the Direct Link Hypothesis. Instead, we observed significant correlations between the emotional responses evoked by the music and the corresponding colors. This underscores the fundamental and universal role of shared emotion in bridging the gap between color and music across different cultural contexts. This study yields valuable insights for optimizing the presentation of coherent information in cross-modal design.

Inspired by Kandinsky's original postulation of specific color-shape association preferences in human beings (i.e., blue circle, red square and yellow triangle), extensive literature from diverse cultural backgrounds has re-examined this issue and achieved a consensus on the existence of such preferences, yet there is disagreement on the specific association patterns. In this study, we investigated the association between color and basic geometric shapes among Chinese college students. Correspondence analysis revealed that both circles and triangles are highly associated with yellow. Circles are also associated with red, while squares exhibit a strong association with blue. Additionally, we confirmed Kandinsky's theory that the angular characteristics of shapes affect the choice of warm and cold colors assigned to them. Interestingly, neither personality traits nor affect states affect the color-shape association preference despite their influences on either color or shape preference alone. Our findings suggest that people may share universal aesthetic preferences to a certain extent. These results have implications for future product design and generative art, where color and shape are crucial elements for visual communication.

Starting with Birkhoff's (1933) proposal of monotonic inverse relationship between aesthetic preference and the complexity, extensive research has been conducted to modify and expand this equation by considering other factors to account for the large individual difference in aesthetic experiences. This study revisits this issue and reveals that Chinese ink paintings are appreciated equally regardless of complexity, while European oil paintings are generally perceived as more appealing when they have greater image complexity. Additionally, not only extrinsic factors of the artwork itself, but also viewers’ intrinsic spatial information processing capacity play crucial roles in accounting for variations in aesthetic bias toward complex visual elements when viewing landscape paintings. We propose that the fundamental spatial information processing ability may exert implicit yet significant influences on human aesthetic appreciation of landscape artworks, which are independent of semantic and cultural factors.

Aesthetic appreciation of art is not solely determined by intrinsic properties of the artwork, such as visual complexity. Extrinsic factors related to the observer, such as their visual working memory capacity, which enables real-time storage and manipulation of visual information, also play a role in shaping aesthetic appreciation. In this study, we investigated the contributions of both intrinsic and extrinsic factors to the aesthetic appreciation of traditional Chinese ink landscape paintings. Our results showed that an individual's visual working memory capacity predicts the extent to which they enjoy the paintings from their own culture. This work provides new insights into the relationship between the viewer's cognitive ability and intrinsic properties of artwork in aesthetic appreciation in the Chinese context.