Aesthetic Appreciation as a Matter of Expertise in Car Design

The paper reports a study on expertise-determined perception and evaluation differences between designers and design-inexperienced recipients when judging car-exterior models varying systematically in innovativeness and balance. Following the assumptions of Leder, Belke, Oeberst, and Augustin (2004), gaze behaviour, attractiveness assessments, and affective state of 11 designers, 11 engineers, and 11 humanities scholars were collected in a three-phased repeated measurement quasi-experiment. Group comparisons confirmed the proposed interaction of stimulus properties and expertise, while unexpected findings regarding aesthetic emotions were observed