Head of the Aesthetics and Learning Lab

Eva Specker joined the IWM as a professor on 01.04.2025, and is the Head of the Aesthetics and Learning Lab (ALL). With her lab, she aims to understand how aesthetic experiences can be a source of learning and what can be learned from aesthetic experience, please see the lab page for further details. She has always been interested by the role aesthetics and art play in our lives, and how they can be sources of learning in a broad sense. To study these topics she starts from a strong psychological background, while also integrating other interdisciplinary perspectives.

Main research topics

• Empirical Aesthetics

• Aesthetic Experience in ecologically valid settings (primarly the museum)

• The role of genuineness and media

• Psychometrics (i.e. measurement development, theory, and modelling), applied to empirical aesthetics