What did you study?
Interface icons are central to everyday digital interaction. Their semantic and aesthetic features may shape not only how they look, but also how easily they are understood. Yet neuroscientific evidence remains limited regarding when and where different features influence icon processing in the brain.
I investigated how concreteness (resemblance to real-world objects), attractiveness (visual appeal), and familiarity (previous experience with an icon or its style) shape icon perception. Combining behavioural experiments with magnetoencephalography (MEG), the research examined their effects on ease of understanding and the temporal and spatial dynamics of neural activity.
What were the results of your research or What is its main finding?
Different icon features contribute to icon processing in distinct ways, but concreteness plays the most consistent and sustained role. Concrete icons, whose forms have clearer links to real-world objects or concepts, were understood faster than abstract icons, and this advantage was visible in brain activity from about 90 milliseconds after an icon appeared, remaining through later stages linked to meaning. Attractiveness had a briefer and more spatially limited neural effect, concentrated in early visual processing, and its relationship with ease of understanding was weak once concreteness and familiarity were taken into account. Familiarity with an icon's visual style, meanwhile, was linked more strongly to aesthetic appeal than to understanding itself.
How can the results be applied?
Because different icon features act at different stages and shape different outcomes, design decisions can be made more precisely depending on context. In situations demanding instant recognition, such as safety signage, medical devices, or vehicle dashboards, concreteness deserves particular attention, especially for novice users, older adults, or cross-cultural users who have not yet built up familiarity with a given design style. Aesthetic refinement remains valuable, but should be evaluated separately from recognizability rather than assumed to improve it automatically, a distinction that may also help designers assess large sets of icons, including those generated by AI tools, more systematically.
What new insights did the research contribute to the topic?
The dissertation provides new evidence that icon features related to semantic and aesthetic dimensions influence neural dynamics through partly distinct mechanisms, rather than acting as a single, unified process. This refines our understanding of the long-debated aesthetic–usability effect at the level of individual interface elements.
Dissertation event information
M.A. Jiaqi Zheng defends their doctoral dissertation in Cognitive Science "The Synergy of Form and Function: Investigating how Icon Features and Aesthetic Appraisal Modulate Icon Processing with Behavioral and Neuroimaging Evidence".
Opponent is Assistant Professor Irene Reppa (Swansea University) and Custos is Associate Professor Tuomo Kujala.
The language of the dissertation is English. The event can be followed in the hall L304 (Liikunta) or online.
