www.elsevier.com/locate/brainres Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Research Report The esthetic preference of Chinese typefaces – An event-related potential study Rui Li a,b , Ruilin Qin a,b , Junsong Zhang a,b,n , Junjie Wu a,b , Changle Zhou a,b a Cognitive Science Department, Xiamen University, Xiamen, China b Fujian Key Laboratory of the Brain-like Intelligent Systems (Xiamen University), Xiamen, China article info Article history: Accepted 26 November 2014 Available online 8 December 2014 Keywords: Typeface Esthetic Implicit Event-related potentials abstract Emotional stimuli such as pictures, logos, geometric shapes, etc can evoke human esthetic preference from previous neuroesthetic studies. Chinese characters can be considered as emotional stimuli as they have an important property: typeface. Intuitively, the emotional meaning of Chinese characters can cause esthetic preference. However, whether a typeface can cause esthetic preference or not from an empirical perspective is still unknown. To address this issue, participants' event-related potential (ERP) waves are recorded while they are presented a series of Chinese characters in different typefaces. Participants are asked to distinguish specific target from the others. Afterwards, from the Chinese characters presented in this task, participants are asked individually to select the characters they like the most and dislike the most. By recording the ERP responses (a response of implicit preference to Chinese characters themselves) during the experi- ment to different typefaces of Chinese characters, we find a significant difference between disliked and all characters in the frontal–central area in the 200–300 ms window after the stimulus' onset. In the 400–600 ms window, after the stimulus' onset, a significant bias for disliked characters emerges in frontal, central, parietal and occipital areas. Our results suggest that people could make a rapid, implicit esthetic preference for the typefaces of Chinese characters. & 2014 Published by Elsevier B.V. 1. Introduction "Had I been born Chinese, I would have been a calligra- pher, not a painter." Pablo Picasso Typeface, as an important characteristic can be repre- sented by different styles, such as standard computer font, handwriting, and master piece by great calligraphers. Intuitively, to read is not only to understand the meaning of a word, but also to see the typeface of the word itself. Accord- ing to some neuroesthetic studies, some daily stimuli such as logos, pictures and geometric graphs could trigger human implicit esthetic preference, even in the absence of an evaluation and decision-making guide (Bargh and Ferguson, 2000; Höfel and Jacobsen, 2007a; Handy et al., 2010). In addition, the emotional meaning of a word can evoke our esthetic preference. However, whether the typeface, as an http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2014.11.055 0006-8993/& 2014 Published by Elsevier B.V. n Corresponding author at: Cognitive Science Department, Xiamen University, Xiamen, China. E-mail address: zhangjs@xmu.edu.cn ( J. Zhang). brainresearch 1598 (2015)57–65