Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Repetition is ubiquitous in art and nature, yet its effects on aesthetic experience remain unclear. In a preregistered experiment, we demonstrate that increasing group size (1, 9, or 25 repeated faces) increases judgments of aesthetic value but decreases judgments of liking. We also identified the possible mechanisms underlying their dissociation. Mediation analyses revealed that both judgments (liking and value) were comparably influenced by fluency-based hedonic processing. Awe-related affective states contributed differently: threat-based awe was more closely associated with reduced liking, whereas positive awe more strongly enhanced aesthetic value. These findings highlight that liking and aesthetic value are not interchangeable indicators of a single hedonic response: liking is more tightly linked to survival-related processes, whereas aesthetic value is more strongly shaped by elaborated meanings and higher-order cognitive processing.