Effects of product visual design consistency on brand recognition and state anxiety: a psychophysiological study integrating heart rate variability and self-report measures.

BACKGROUND: Product visual design consistency is regarded as an important characteristic of product family design and brand identity. In industrial design, it is understood as the overall coherence of multiple visual attributes across products within a product family. Although such coherence has been suggested to facilitate information processing and product recognition, its potential psychophysiological associations with consumer responses remain insufficiently understood. As an exploratory investigation, this study aims to provide preliminary evidence of the psychophysiological correlates of visual design consistency in real-world commercial contexts. METHODS: This exploratory study employed a within-subject design to examine systematic associations between visual design consistency and multiple response domains. A within-subject experiment was conducted with 64 university students. Participants completed brand identification tasks using standardized images of two commercial product systems representing relatively high and relatively low levels of visual design consistency. During the tasks, electrocardiography (ECG) was continuously recorded to derive heart rate variability (HRV) indices (SDNN and RMSSD), while brand recognition accuracy and State-Trait Anxiety Inventory-State (STAI-State) scores were also collected. RESULTS: Compared with products characterized by relatively lower visual design consistency, products with relatively higher visual design consistency were associated with significantly higher brand recognition accuracy (p < 0.001), higher SDNN (p = 0.016, r = 0.31), higher RMSSD (p < 0.001, r = 0.61), and lower STAI-State scores (p = 0.002, r = 0.39). The three response domains (behavioral performance, HRV indices, and self-reported anxiety) showed convergent patterns across conditions, indicating systematic co-occurrence of differences in cognitive performance, autonomic activity, and subjective emotional states between the two product systems. CONCLUSION: These findings provide exploratory psychophysiological evidence that exposure to commercial product systems characterized by relatively higher visual design consistency is systematically associated with differences in brand recognition performance, autonomic nervous system activity, and state anxiety. As an exploratory investigation employing ecologically valid commercial product systems in which multiple visual attributes and brand-related characteristics naturally co-occur, the findings should be interpreted as evidence of multimodal associations rather than causal effects. Future studies using experimentally controlled stimuli are warranted to disentangle the respective contributions of individual visual design dimensions and related perceptual factors.