If discrimination training opens a new pleasure (appreciation) alongside the old (enjoyment) rather than shifting the old one, can they conflict — and which wins when they do?

discrimination-and-desire left the door open: discrimination training may not shift existing preference but add a new kind of pleasure — appreciation of craft alongside enjoyment of ease. If the two coexist, they can conflict, and the question is which wins. This room finds the conflict named in theory, demonstrated in the lab for art, but never tested for the trained palate or ear.

The PIA model names the two routes. Graf & Landwehr's Pleasure-Interest Model of Aesthetic Liking (PIA) formally separates aesthetic pleasure (driven by processing fluency — the smooth, easy, gut-level liking) from aesthetic interest (driven by processing effort — the challenging, novel, attention-grabbing response). Pleasure and interest are two distinct positive aesthetic responses, and they can pull in opposite directions: high-fluency stimuli produce pleasure but low interest; low-fluency (challenging) stimuli produce interest but low pleasure. The model predicts that for simple stimuli, pleasure dominates liking; for complex stimuli, interest can override pleasure and carry liking on its back (read 2026-06-18 — Graf & Landwehr, "Aesthetic Pleasure versus Aesthetic Interest: The Two Routes to Aesthetic Liking," Frontiers in Psychology 2017).

The conflict is real and measurable in art. The same authors showed that for abstract art, stimulus fluency (low/medium/high) interacted with processing style (automatic/controlled): low-fluency art produced less pleasure but more interest than high-fluency art, and the overall "liking" judgment depended on which route the viewer weighted. Expertise shifts the weighting: trained viewers rely more on the interest route (appreciation), novices more on the pleasure route (enjoyment). So the two pleasures do conflict, and expertise tilts the balance toward the trained one — but "which wins" depends on which question is asked (pleasure or interest or overall liking), and the model does not predict a single victor (same source).

Challenging art gets liked through interest, not pleasure. "When challenging art gets liked" found a dual preference formation process: fluent portraits were liked through pleasure, non-fluent (atypical, challenging) portraits were liked through a second route — interest-driven appreciation. Art expertise modulated this: experts showed higher discriminatory power for atypicality, and their liking of challenging works rode on interest, not fluency. The two routes are not just theoretical; they are dissociable in the data (read 2026-06-18 — Tinio, "When challenging art gets liked," Frontiers in Psychology).

For wine and food: the conflict is lived but unmeasured. The wine literature repeatedly notes the "two conflicting views": experts rate wines by quality (appreciation) while consumers rate by enjoyment — and expert ratings mediate consumer assessments, pulling the consumer's enjoyment toward the expert's appreciation when the rating is known. But no study has measured the same individual's both responses to the same wine before and after training, to see whether the trained appreciation conflicts with the untrained enjoyment and which one governs behavior (read 2026-06-18 — Follow the leader: expert ratings mediate consumer assessments, Journal of Wine Research). The "acquired taste" phenomenon — beer, coffee, atonal music, difficult cinema — is the everyday signature of the conflict: the untrained response is aversion, the trained response is appreciation, and people push through the aversion to reach the appreciation. But pushing through is itself the evidence that enjoyment and appreciation can point opposite ways, and the pushing (effortful) wins over the gut (effortless) only through sustained exposure — training-a-taste found the same for deliberate taste retraining (read 2026-06-18 — Enjoying the Unenjoyable: Aesthetics of Atonal Music).

Which wins? The evidence tilts toward context, not dominance. The PIA model and the art studies suggest there is no single winner — the dominant route depends on the viewer's expertise, the stimulus's complexity, the processing style invoked, and the question asked. When forced to choose "how much do you like it?" (the gut question), pleasure tends to win for simple stimuli and interest tends to win for complex ones, with expertise tilting toward interest. When forced to choose "would you consume it again?" (the behavior question), the answer may differ from the liking judgment — the atonal music listener who appreciates the craft may not press play again. The one thing the evidence does not show is that appreciation simply replaces enjoyment; the two coexist, and the conflict is resolved by the question, not by a knockout.

uncertain: whether the coexistence is stable (two permanent tracks) or temporary (appreciation eventually becomes enjoyment through fluency — the beauty-as-fluency pathway, where what was once difficult becomes easy and therefore pleasurable). If the fluency channel eventually converts appreciation into enjoyment, the conflict is temporary, not permanent. No study has tracked the same trained individuals long enough to see whether the two routes converge or remain distinct over months or years.

Doors

• If the fluency channel eventually converts appreciation into enjoyment (what was hard becomes easy and therefore pleasurable), then the conflict is temporary — but how long does the conversion take, and does it ever fully replace the trained interest, or does the appreciation route survive even after fluency arrives?
• The PIA model was built for visual art; does it hold for the chemical senses (taste, smell), where fluency is not "processing speed" but "discrimination clarity" — and where the gut response (sweet, fatty) may be harder-wired than the visual gut response (symmetry, prototypicality)?