The detail is more pleasant than the whole: Global and local prime affect esthetic appreciation of artworks showing whole-part ambiguity

Esthetic experience is the result of the coordination of different cognitive processes. It has been widely reported that top-down processes of orienting of attention interact with bottom-up perceptual facilitation occurring during esthetic experience of artworks. Here we use whole-part ambiguity as a tool to test the effect of global and local prime on esthetic appreciation of complex visual artworks. To this aim 139 healthy young individuals completed an esthetic judgment of Arcimboldo’s ambiguous artworks, which were preceded by a local or global prime. Their perceptual style was also assessed using a Navon task. We found that local prime significantly enhanced esthetic appreciation of ambiguous portraits. Also, we found that prime level interacted with individual’s perceptual style: participants showing local perceptual style liked less ambiguous portraits when they were preceded by global prime. Overall, the present findings shed some light on the processes involved in esthetic experience, pointing towards a pivotal role of re-direction of attention towards perceptual features of the artworks and its interaction with individual factors, such as perceptual style.

The Effect of Educational Workshops in an Art Gallery on Children’s Evaluation and Interpretation of Contemporary Art

Our experiment, conducted in an art gallery, was designed to investigate how educational classes, provided for children of different ages, affect their (a) esthetic judgment and (b) interpretation of contemporary art. We found that curator-led tours and art workshops affected the ratings given by the youngest children (aged 4–5 years), while interpretation was influenced by contextual cues only in the case of older children (aged 6–7 and 8–9 years). In addition, in the control condition (uncued exhibition tour), the oldest children (aged 8–9 years) rated the artworks higher than the youngest children (4–5). We conclude that the deeper understanding of the context of art increases its attractiveness and may change the way in which artworks are interpreted. Our results suggest that cognitive development is not an indispensable requirement to appreciate art, as contextual cues provided to preschool-aged children substantially affect their esthetic assessment of contemporary art.

Individual Differences in Concept Learning of Painting Styles

52 male and female adults were given a concept-learning task involving abstract and representational painting styles. The task involved learning to recognize new instances of artists' paintings on the basis of exposure to previous exemplars. Subjects were also given Cattell's 16 PF, Meier's Art Judgment Test, and the Quick Test (to assess intelligence). Results indicated that learning of both painting styles occurred, although the ability to learn one type of art did not predict the degree of success at learning the other. The ability to learn abstract versus representational styles was related to different individual-difference variables, although correlations were generally low. Learning abstract styles was correlated with self-conflict and tension while learning representational art was correlated with measures of self-assuredness and good esthetic judgment.