Visual fluency- 1 Affective and Cognitive Consequences of Visual Fluency: When Seeing is Easy on the Mind.

The question of what makes visual stimuli persuasive has a long tradition in theories of aesthetics. At least since Plato and Aristotle, theoreticians pondered what makes for evocative sculpture, good architecture, and appealing design. As the Greek philosophers noted, some images influence perceivers via their symbolic meaning, such as themes of transcendence, intimacy, heroism, conflict or struggle. Other images affect perceivers via their formal aspects, such as harmony, balance, symmetry, proportion, and simplicity. The Greek philosophers also suggested that some images speak through the head while others speak through the heart, or to use more modern terms, convey a message or create an experience. The present paper addresses some of these classic questions from the perspective of recent psychological research that explored the interplay of declarative and experiential information in human judgment. Traditionally, models of human judgment have assumed that our evaluations of a given object are based on accessible declarative information bearing on the object. Challenging this assumption, a growing body of research demonstrated that one’s affective experiences, like one’s mood at the time o