Experimental psycho-aesthetics—the science aimed at understanding the factors that
determine aesthetic experience—is reviewed briefly as background to describe the
Parallellepipeda project, a cross-over project between artists and
scientists in Leuven. In particular, I sketch how it started and developed further, with
close interactions between the participating artists and scientists. A few examples of
specific research projects are mentioned to illustrate the kind of research questions we
address and the methodological approach we have taken. We often found an effect of
providing participants with additional information, a difference between novice and expert
participants, and a shift with increasing experience with an artwork, in the direction of
tolerating more complexity and acquiring more order from it. By establishing more
connections between parts of an artwork and more associations to the artwork, it becomes a
stronger Gestalt, which is more easily mastered by the viewer and leads to increased
appreciation. In the final part of the paper, I extract some general lessons from the
project regarding a possible new way of doing psycho-aesthetics research, which is able to
solve some of the problems of traditional experimental psycho-aesthetics (eg, trade-off
between experimental control and ecological validity).
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