The impact of contextual information on aesthetic engagement of artworks

How does contextual information affect aesthetic appreciation and gaze behavior in figurative and abstract artwork?

Numerous studies have investigated how providing contextual information with artwork influences gaze behavior, yet the evidence that contextually triggered changes in oculomotor behavior when exploring artworks may be linked to changes in aesthetic experience remains mixed. The aim of this study was to investigate how three levels of contextual information influenced people's aesthetic appreciation and visual exploration of both abstract and figurative art. Participants were presented with an artwork and one of three contextual information levels: a title, title plus information on the aesthetic design of the piece, or title plus information about the semantic meaning of the piece. We measured participants liking, interest and understanding of artworks and recorded exploration duration, fixation count and fixation duration on regions of interest for each piece. Contextual information produced greater aesthetic appreciation and more visual exploration in abstract artworks. In contrast, figurative artworks were highly dependent on liking preferences and less affected by contextual information. Our results suggest that the effect of contextual information on aesthetic ratings arises from an elaboration effect, such that the viewer aesthetic experience is enhanced by additional information, but only when the meaning of an artwork is not obvious.

Genetic effects on variability in visual aesthetic evaluations are partially shared across visual domains

The aesthetic values that individuals place on visual images are formed and shaped over a lifetime. However, whether the formation of visual aesthetic value is solely influenced by environmental exposure is still a matter of debate. Here, we considered differences in aesthetic value emerging across three visual domains: abstract images, scenes, and faces. We examined variability in two major dimensions of ordinary aesthetic experiences: taste-typicality and evaluation-bias. We build on two samples from the Australian Twin Registry where 1547 and 1231 monozygotic and dizygotic twins originally rated visual images belonging to the three domains. Genetic influences explained 26% to 41% of the variance in taste-typicality and evaluation-bias. Multivariate analyses showed that genetic effects were partially shared across visual domains. Results indicate that the heritability of major dimensions of aesthetic evaluations is comparable to that of other complex social traits, albeit lower than for other complex cognitive traits. The exception was taste-typicality for abstract images, for which we found only shared and unique environmental influences. Our study reveals that diverse sources of genetic and environmental variation influence the formation of aesthetic value across distinct visual domains and provides improved metrics to assess inter-individual differences in aesthetic value.