Relationship between Perception of Order/Disorder and Perceptual Processing Fluency

Humans have various impressions for visual stimulus such as order/disorder and aesthetic preference, but the brain characteristics that each impression reflects are not readily apparent. We hypothesized that perception of order/disorder reflects the stimulus processing fluency. We conducted one preliminary experiment and two main experiments. The preliminary experiment simultaneously presented two stimuli to participants, who judged which stimulus was the more disordered. We scored perception of order/disorder using participants' responses. The main experiments used a same-different judgment task to assess the hypothesis. We presented two stimuli simultaneously, scored with perception of order/disorder. Participants reported whether the stimuli were the same or not. Participants easily judged whether the two stimuli were the same or not when the same-difference task included the stimulus perceived as orderly. Results suggest that the impression of order/disorder reflects the processing fluency for each stimulus.