The Function of Aesthetics in our Lives

Imagine taking a walk through your neighborhood, what do you see? Architecture, greenery, other people, street art perhaps? If you think about these things, do you think they are beautiful? Do you think beauty matters in this case? In the current project, this is what we are interested in. We want to find out what role aesthetics, and specifically beauty, plays in our every day life. How can beauty be useful? We generally think of beauty or aesthetics as related to only art, but actually humans can perceive beauty in almost anything. We may not be aware of itbut beauty guides our attention. Perhaps you have experienced this yourself when seeing a beautiful person on the street or when passing a piece of street art: we stop, stare, and admire. We look longer at things we find beautiful. Lab research has shown this relationship many times but what about the outside world? What about our everyday life? Our ability to see beauty in the world has been linked to adaptive success in evolution. But, beauty can only be evolutionarily relevant if it appliesbeyond the labto our everyday life. To investigate the role of beauty in our everyday life we will take our research outside of the laboratory and into the real world. We will have participants report on their daily experiences with beauty to see how beauty can influence us during our normal life. And, we will use technical advancements such as mobile eye-tracking to, for example, measure what people look at in natural environments. Here we will focus on an everyday urban environment as well as a museum which can be seen as a typical environment to experience beauty in. Does beauty play the same or a different role in these different environments? We think that beauty shapes our everyday life, and now we will test this idea.