Curiosity Emerging From the Perception of Change in Music

Music offers a useful opportunity to consider the factors contributing to the experience of curiosity in the context of dynamically changing stimuli. Here, we tested the hypothesis that the perception of change in music triggers curiosity as to how the heard music will unfold. Participants were presented with unfamiliar musical excerpts and asked to provide continuous ratings of their subjective experience of curiosity and calm, and their perception of change, as the music unfolded. As hypothesized, we found that for all musical pieces, the perceptual experience of change Granger-caused feelings of curiosity but not feelings of calm. Our results suggest music is a powerful tool with which to examine the factors contributing to curiosity induction. Accordingly, we outline ways in which extensions to the approach taken here may be useful: both in elucidating our information-seeking drive more generally, and in elucidating the manifestation of this drive during music listening.

Drawing and Memory: What is the Content of Children’s Drawings and How Does it Differ From Their Verbal Reports?

This study investigated whether the content of children’s drawings of an event changes over three successive interviews about that event. It also assessed whether children recall more details verbally than they draw. Twenty-seven 3- to 6-year old children witnessed a live event which ended with one actor stealing a cuddly toy. They were interviewed about it 1 day, 2 weeks, and 6 months later. At each interview, children were asked to make a drawing of the event while narrating what happened. We analyzed the content of the drawings for seven features relevant to the event as well as inaccurate information. Children’s inclusion of “the perpetrator” and “the victim” decreased over time but the other features remained stable. Children verbally reported significantly more details than they drew. Our findings suggest that children provide less information in drawings than in verbal reports, but this information may be more reliable and stable compared to verbal reports over multiple interviews.

Aesthetic Disposition, Educational Capital, Personality Trait Openness, and Sex: A Study of French High-School Students

Aesthetic disposition has been defined as the propensity to prioritize form over function and to approach any object as potentially valuable from an aesthetic standpoint. In this study, we examined whether and how aesthetic disposition was predicted by educational capital, personality trait openness, and sex. In addition, we investigated the association of educational capital and sex with openness. We compared students from a general high school (“high” educational-capital group) with students from a vocational high school (“low” educational-capital group). We found that (a) aesthetic disposition was positively associated with educational capital and, to a lesser extent, with openness, (b) sex was of minor importance in the distribution of aesthetic disposition, and (c) openness was positively linked to educational capital and unrelated to sex. Our findings support the view that educational capital plays an important role in the social distribution of aesthetic disposition and highlight a link between education and openness.

Why Do People Visit Art Museums? Examining Visitor Motivations and Visit Outcomes

People visit museums with differing motivations. We use Falk’s visitor identity model to examine visitors’ motivations to visit an art museum. We assess (1) the prevalence of different motivation types; (2) how visit motivations and outcomes relate to visit satisfaction and length; and (3) the relation between visit motivations and fulfillment of expectations. We found that (1) visitors most strongly endorsed motivations and visit outcomes related to exploration and least strongly to facilitating another’s visit; (2) visit outcomes predicted visit satisfaction and length more strongly than did visit motivations; and (3) visit outcomes largely met or exceeded the visitors’ pre-visit expectations. The present findings suggest that outcomes of the visit matter more than motivations for visiting. We suggest that examining the entirety of a visit—pre-visit motivation and post-visit outcomes—may provide new insights about art museum visits that may be obscured when focusing on just one of these aspects.

Global Saccadic Eye Movements Characterise Artists’ Visual Attention While Drawing

Previous research has shown that artists employ flexible attentional strategies during offline perceptual tasks. The current study explored visual processing online, by tracking the eye movements of artists and non-artists (n=65) while they produced representational drawings of photographic stimuli. The findings revealed that it is possible to differentiate artists from non-artists on the basis of the relative amount of global-to-local saccadic eye movements they make when looking at the target stimulus while drawing, but not in a preparatory free viewing phase. Results indicated that these differences in eye movements are not specifically related to representational drawing ability, and may be a feature of artistic ability more broadly. This eye movement analysis technique may be used in future research to characterise the dynamics of attentional shifts in eye movements while artists are carrying out a range of artistic tasks.

Dance Across Cultures: Joint Action Aesthetics in Japan and the UK

Western European and East Asian cultures show marked differences in aesthetic appreciation of the visual arts. East Asian aesthetics are often associated with a holistic focus on balance and harmony, in contrast to Western aesthetics, which often focus on the expression of the individual. In this study, we examined whether cultural differences also exist in relation to the aesthetics of dance. Japanese and British participants completed an online survey in which they evaluated synchronous and asynchronous dance video clips on eight semantic differential scales. We observed that the aesthetics of group dance depend on cultural background. Specifically, British participants preferred asynchronous over synchronous dance whereas Japanese participants equally liked synchronous and asynchronous dance movement. For both cultures, preferences were based on distinct semantic associations with movement synchrony. We argue that cultural differences in aesthetic perception of group dance relate to the culturally specific social signals conveyed by unison movement.

Experiences of Ugliness in Nature and Urban environments

In folk psychology experiences of ugliness are associated with the negation of beauty and disorder, but empirical evidence is remarkably rare. Here, participants (called informed) took 102 photographs of ugly landscapes and urban scenes and reflected on their experiences. Later, participants naïve to the intentional ugliness in the photographs rated landscapes higher than informed participants. The ratings for urban scenes were similar in the two cohorts. Reflective notes revealed that emotional experiences with visual ugliness could overlap (e.g. decay), but ugliness was associated more frequently with fear and death in landscapes, and with sadness and disgust in urban scenes. The findings uncovered a complex layer of associations. Experiences triggered by perceived ugliness were contingent on a composite of socio-cultural, emotional, and evolutionary factors. Rather than being the endpoint on an aesthetic scale culminating with beauty, ugliness seems to be experienced as an independent aesthetic experience with its own processing streams.

Judged Beauty of Fractal Symmetries

Fractals are patterns that show self-similarity at different levels of scale. Typically they appear in nature and this degree of similarity is approximate or statistical. However, artificial or exact fractals have also been studied and the advantage of these stimuli is the ability to more carefully control the relationships that occur across various hierarchies. In two experiments we studied the perceived beauty of a novel class of exact visual fractal in which we introduced reflection, rotation, translation, and random symmetries that repeated at a local and global levels. Rotation and reflection were consistently preferred to translation and randomness. Only reflected patterns were preferred at a vertical orientation. For all other symmetries there was no difference in preference between vertical and horizontal. In a second experiment we progressively eliminated the salience of local symmetry through opaque shading . Perceived beauty decreased with an increase in shading . For these patterns greater discriminability of their fractal quality makes them more aesthetically appealing.

Intersections Between Awe and the Sublime: A Preliminary Empirical Study

This empirical study examines how philosophical work on the sublime relates to contemporary psychological work on awe. We operationalized several aspects of the sublime drawing from prominent philosophical theories and analyzed them in relation to three different measures of awe: the modified Differential Emotions Scale (mDES), the awe sub-scale of the Dispositional Positive Emotion Scale (DPES), and the Awe Experience Scale (AWE-S). We carried out an Exploratory Factor Analysis on our items on the sublime. We found high correlations between these items and the measures of awe, especially with the self-loss and connectedness dimensions of the AWE-S. By operationalizing aspects of the sublime drawn from influential philosophical theories and comparing them with psychological measures of awe, we find a large degree of overlap between awe and the sublime, suggesting that these two literatures could inform one another.

What Type of Title Would You Put on Your Paintings?: The Impact on the Price of Artwork According to Its Title

This paper investigated the impact of the type of title on the price of the artwork effects using the hammer price of the paintings auctioned in Korea during a two-year period from December 2017 to November 2019. The results of the analysis showed that a descriptive title had a negative effect on the prices fetched, whereas a more elaborate title had a positive effect on auction prices. Also, it was found that elaborate titles for abstract paintings had a significant positive impact on the hammer price. In the case of unknown artists, a descriptive title had a negative effect on the auction price, while the absence of a title had a positive impact. The findings of this study suggest that artists must make careful decisions when titling their work because the title of the work affects the purchase decisions of art collectors.