Moderate Contrast in the Evaluation of Paintings Is Liked More but Remembered Less than High Contrast.

Katinka Dijkstra,Noah N N Van Dongen

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01507

Katinka Dijkstra, Noah N N Van Dongen

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01507

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Abstract

Many visual aspects of paintings, as well as exposure to art and cultural norms, contribute to the aesthetic evaluation of paintings. The current study looked at heightened visual contrast as an important factor in the appreciation of paintings. Participants evaluated abstract digitized paintings that were manipulated in contrast for an appreciation task and were later presented with these paintings in a memory task. The results indicated that for art appreciation, a moderate increase in contrast resulted in the highest appreciation for paintings whereas recognition memory was better for paintings with a higher increase in contrast. These results replicate earlier findings with regard to the role of contrast in aesthetic perception and extend these findings by demonstrating a surprising different effect of contrast manipulation for recognition memory. Confidence with which memory decisions were made was in line with art appreciation decisions not memory performance.

Highlights

When are paintings considered to be works of art? Factors that appear to contribute to these considerations are visual aspects of the object, its perceived similarity to other objects, processing fluency when evaluating it (Reber et al, 2004; Graham et al, 2010), or the hedonic response to the painting (Vessel et al, 2012)
Visual contrast is important because stimuli high in contrast are higher in perceptual fluency than stimuli low in contrast which may affect the appreciation of artworks (Reber et al, 2004; Tinio et al, 2011)
The results indicated that participants consistently favored high contrast versions over the low contrast counterparts, the effects of paintings that were high in contrast originally were smaller

Summary

Introduction

When are paintings considered to be works of art? Factors that appear to contribute to these considerations are visual aspects of the object, its perceived similarity to other objects, processing fluency when evaluating it (Reber et al, 2004; Graham et al, 2010), or the hedonic response to the painting (Vessel et al, 2012). Another study showed that visual stimuli (characters and signs) had higher aesthetic appearance ratings when they had high contrast, such as black-on-white, than when they had low contrast, such as turquoise-on-green, especially a under high luminance contrast condition (Shieh and Lai, 2008). It is the combination of color and luminance contrast that results in high ratings of aesthetic appearance of stimuli that are not associated with art. The results of this study support the link between aesthetic appreciation of visual stimuli and high contrast levels

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