Table 1.

Factors influencing art appreciation.

Inputs	Processing mechanisms	Outcomes
Self-related	Implicit	Immediate
States (e.g., mood, affect, attention) Traits (e.g., self-concept, social schemas, personality, cognitive and perceptual capacities) Prior experience (e.g., domain specific expertise, memory, tastes, interests, culture)	Perceptual analysis Memory integration Embodied simulation Emotional resonance Initial classification	Emotional appraisal (e.g., negative, positive, mixed emotions) Aesthetic decision/evaluation (e.g., preference, pleasure, like/want, good/bad) Bodily/physiological response (e.g., chills, tears, arousal) Insight and/or epiphany
Object-centered	Explicit	Longitudinal
Formal properties (e.g., symmetry, statistical profile, harmony, dynamism, style) Meaning-related content Environmental context Sensory information (e.g., noise, temperature, lighting)	Directed attention Evaluative criteria (e.g., relevance, intentionality, style, content) Metacognitive awareness (i.e., self-monitoring) Self-reflection Meaning-making	Social knowledge Self-understanding (e.g., belief/schema revision) Other-understanding (e.g., developing empathy, perspective-taking, “practice” mentalizing) Well-being/flourishing/health Perceptual skills (e.g., visual discrimination) Cognitive skills (e.g., creativity)

An information processing account of art appreciation denoting self and other referential processing as well as the immediate and longitudinal socio-epistemic outcomes. Note that this table lists factors and processing mechanisms relevant to art appreciation but does not highlight the temporality or connectivity between the factors. For a review of models that differ on these dimensions, see Pelowski et al. (2016).