Pixel Art Style Affects Temporal Estimation in Visualized Situations - Original Article

Aug 20, 2026

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This study evaluates how pixel art style influences people’s perception of illustrated situations and, specifically, temporal estimation. Experiment A assigned 166 participants to observe the same dining scenario in pixel versus vector art styles and found limited emotion changes but a tendency to regard the pixel version as belonging to an earlier era. Experiment B extended testing across 6 dining situations with 189 participants and confirmed earlier-period judgments for pixel-based displays. Imagination effects remain unclear, while the temporal shift suggests practical value for game and visual communication design.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

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Pages11

Reading Time28 min

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Introduction

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Research Questions

International Journal of Affective Engineering Vol.22 No.2 pp.145-155 (2023) doi: 10.5057/ijae.IJAE-D-23-00002 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Pixel Art Style Affects Temporal Estimation in Visualized Situations Suomiya BAO University of Tsukuba, 1-1-1 Tennodai, Tsukuba-shi, Ibaraki 305-8577, Japan Abstract: This study intends to discuss the potential effects of pixel art style on people’s perception. In Experiment A, 166 participants were randomly assigned to 2 groups, observed the same dining situation in pixel and vector art style respectively. Results showed that art style did not have a big impact on emotions, however raised a hypothesis that people might tend to believe the situation is in a past era when observing the pixel version. To test that, in Experiment B using 6 different dining situations involving 189 participants, it is found that people in pixel group indeed tend to believe that the situations happen in an earlier period. The effects of pixel art style on imagination remains unclear. This study revealed the potential impact of pixel art style on people’s temporal estimation. This phenomenon could be taken advantage of in game design and visual communication design. Keywords: Situation, Pixel art style, Temporal estimation 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1 Background Previous investigation suggested that visualized situations using simple or detailed sketches was an effective way to represent different product usage situations (e.g. dining situations) . The more detailed a visualized situation is illustrated, the stronger and specific emotions can it evoke, whereas a simple version of the situation could avoid providing too much information for people to relate to themselves [1] . It is suggested that a visualized situation should be as simple as possible, with the right level of simplicity that provide just the needed information to the observers. However, no matter how simple a sketch could be drawn, it always has a certain art style. For example, the visualized dining situation in the previous study [1] was drawn by hand on paper, with a relatively realistic art style. There is no discussion made on how the art style of these sketches could make an impact on people’s comprehension and emotion. To answer this question, there are many steps to be made. First of all, the definition of “art style” is important to be clarified. An art style of an illustration could be easily associated with the specific drawing style consistently used by any mangaka (professional comic book illustrator) . However, any specific art style that recognized by people is a certain combination of various aspects (e.g. lines, colors, shadows, proportions, etc.) . For example, for the aspect of proportions, illustrators could create a cuter art style by simply adjusting the proportion of the human bodies and objects. Therefore, among all these basic aspects of art style, it is essential Received: 2023.02.03 / Accepted: 2023.04.12 J-STAGE Advance Published Date: 2023.05.31 145 to study on each one of them separately. One of the most basic aspects is how the dots and lines are drawn. Some art style might use natural lines, while some might take advantage of different pencil strokes. However, there is amore fundamental difference between how the dots and lines are drawn. A 2D visual illustration is basically either drawn with a vector art style or pixel art style. The simplest difference is, when the lines are continuous, cannot be visually demolished into smaller units, such as dots, it is considered as a vector art style. On the other hand, when the lines are composed by smaller, equal-sized units that are visible to human eyes, it is usually considered as a pixel art style [2] . That being said, pixel art can become vector art, if the pixels are small enough that human eyes cannot recognize them. Pixel art could be found and traced back to the very early age of human civilization, such as mosaic art from Pompeii [3] . Our ancestors use

FAQs

How were pixel and vector art styles compared in the study?

Experiment A randomly assigned 166 participants into two groups that observed the same dining situation presented in either pixel art or vector art style.

What effect did pixel art have on temporal estimation?

Across Experiment B, participants who viewed pixel-style dining situations judged them as happening in an earlier period than those who viewed vector-style versions.

Did pixel art style significantly change emotions and imagination?

Emotion impact was limited in Experiment A, while imagination effects remained unclear, indicating the strongest observed outcome concerned temporal estimation.

Aug 20, 2026

Upload by Mason