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Ph.d.-afhandling - Arkitektskolen Aarhus

Ph.d.-afhandling - Arkitektskolen Aarhus

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distribution. The face stimuli were masked to remove hair and were adjusted to<br />

be of equal size and luminance by using <strong>Ph</strong>otoshop (version 7.0, Adobe, USA).<br />

The faces were centered in a 588x600 pixel black background and presented<br />

at a screen resolution of 1024x768 pixels.<br />

Experimental paradigm<br />

The experimental protocol consisted of an event-related design in which<br />

subjects were scanned while being presented with each of the 168 face stimuli<br />

and the 168 building stimuli in a pseudorandom order, making a total of 336<br />

presentations. On each trial, a fixation cross was presented for 1000ms on a<br />

grey background followed by a stimuli presentation for 3000ms. Subjects were<br />

instructed, within the 3000 ms stimuli duration, to press one of five buttons on<br />

a response key-pad with their right hand to indicate their aesthetic judgment<br />

(1; very unappealing – 5; very appealing). Randomly interspersed with the<br />

stimuli presentations were 56 null event trials. Total scanning-time per subject<br />

was 26 min. in one session. Prior to scanning, subjects were informed that the<br />

study was concerned with investigating aesthetic judgments and subjects were<br />

instructed to declare their immediate aesthetic judgment by pressing the key-<br />

pad button corresponding to the value relevant on the 1-5 judgment scale, but<br />

no reference was made to the experimental aims. It was impressed on the<br />

subjects that they should only concern themselves with their immediate,<br />

subjective response to the pictures. After the scanning task was complete,<br />

subjects were, outside the scanner, presented with the building stimuli again,<br />

and asked to report any stimulus known beforehand to the subject, in order to<br />

rule out any potential effect of familiarity.<br />

Stimuli were presented and responses collected using E-prime (Psychology<br />

Software Tools, Inc.). The stimuli were back-projected via an LCD projector<br />

onto a transparent screen positioned over the subjects’ head and viewed<br />

through a tilted mirror fixed to the head coil.<br />

fMRI Data Acquisition<br />

The functional imaging was conducted by using a 3 Tesla scanner (Siemens,<br />

Magnetom Trio, Erlangen, Germany) to acquire gradient T2* weighted echo<br />

planar images (EPI) to maximize the blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD)<br />

190

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